Annotation Mistborn Chapter Twenty-One Part One
The following is an author’s annotation that relates to a specific chapter of the book MISTBORN: THE FINAL EMPIRE. Note that the following is NOT the text of the actual chapter, but a companion to the chapter, revealing “behind the scenes” information. If you have not read the book up to–and including–this chapter, you risk serious spoilers! Please, if you haven’t read MISTBORN, go visit the sample chapters, or perhaps purchase the book via Amazon.
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Chapter Twenty-One Part One
You can thank my editor Moshe for the canals in this book. He’s a bit of a canal buff, and when he had read through MISTBORN, he excitedly explained to me how canal technology was just perfect for the level of development I had in this book. So, at his suggestion, I changed caravans into convoys, and swapped horses for longboats.
I really like the change. It gets boring seeing, reading, or writing the same old things. So, by getting rid of one standard fantasy element–highways and horses–I think we add something very distinctive to the world.
Moshe, though. Man. He knows TOO much about this stuff.
Originally, I started this chapter by going right into the logbook excerpt. Then, I realized that I had logbook excerpts before and after the chapter heading–which made things confusing. So, I added in the quick sentence about what Kelsier was doing.
This is our first chance to see the text of the logbook collected in a longer form. I don’t repeat all of the chapter epigraphs in-text–just some of the more essential ones. Partially, this is to make certain everyone who’s been skipping the epigraphs has some of that information, and partially it’s so that those of you who HAVE been reading the epigraphs can see some greater context for their order and flow.
In this chapter, we get our first real information on what it was like to work in the Pits of Hathsin. It wasn’t originally planned this way–I was just going to have the caves here be regular caves. The cracks in the ground, however, clicked with me, as that was what I had planned for the Pits. This made for a much more defensible position, as well as let me explore some of Kelsier’s past.
