Introduction

Welcome, everyone, to our final State of the Sanderson for the decade! If you’re not familiar with these posts, each December I take a look back at my year and talk about the projects I’ve been working on. Then I turn an eye to the future to see where I’m planning for things to go in the coming years. If you’d like to see last year’s State of the Sanderson, you can find it at this handy link.

This year was dedicated primarily to writing Stormlight Book Four; I’ll have a specific update on that for you in a little bit. I also spent a lot of time traveling, particularly to Europe—to the point that I’ve been feeling the weight of my travel. (Which indicates it’s time to scale back for a while.)

Stormlight years always have a little less variety than “off” years where I work on a more eclectic mix of stories. So while I got a ton done, there won’t be much in the way of updates on other projects. One thing I wanted to add this year, however, is a little survey—mostly about our leatherbound books. So if you’d do me a favor and hop down to answer a couple of questions, that would help us a ton. I’ve put the survey at the bottom of the following section, which will dig into leatherbounds in depth. This section is a tad long, which will come as no surprise since I wrote it. So if you’re not interested, you might want to meet me back at Part Two.

• Part One: Leatherbounds and Survey Time!
• Part Two: My Year
• Part Three: Updates on Major Projects
• Part Four: Updates on Secondary Projects
• Part Five: Updates on Minor Projects
• Part Six: Film/Television Updates
• Part Seven: Other Cool Projects
• Part Eight: Projected Schedule
• Part Nine: Bonus Section, the Future of the Cosmere

Part One: Leatherbounds and Survey Time!

This year, we’re releasing the Warbreaker leatherbound! This book is particularly gorgeous; we’ve added a few features such as illustrated drop caps and interstitial art. We put these volumes together in-house, rather than farming them out to someone else, and we pour a lot of attention into making them great. Next year is a big year for us, as we’ve reached the tenth anniversary of The Way of Kings, and will be releasing a leatherbound of that book.

Now, some of you might be wondering, “Brandon, isn’t The Way of Kings double the size of the previous books you’ve done as leatherbounds?” Yes. Yes, it is. That’s meant a lot of extra work on the part of my team, who have already been working on it for a good eight months. We want this book to be something extra special—and because of that, we’ve wanted to do preorder incentives (like goodies and swag) to go with it.

The logistics of doing this worried us a lot, however, as we’re still a relatively small team. Beyond that, we expect The Way of Kings leatherbound demand to strain our logistics and shipping departments. When talking about this with Howard Tayler, my cartoonist friend, he suggested we use Kickstarter to alleviate these problems. I was hesitant at first, as I know Kickstarter is mostly intended for people who need extra up-front money in order to create a product. We’ve been able to fund the leatherbounds ourselves so far, and we’re certain we can create these without needing extra time.

However, Howard really sold me on Kickstarter by pointing out how great the site’s management tools are for creators. If I want to offer different packages for the book, with a variety of preorder items personalized to customer preferences, the only way I’d be able to manage this is to take advantage of Kickstarter’s infrastructure and tools. As we’ve looked into the process, my team and I have come to agree that this is the only way we’d be able to do what we want to with The Way of Kings leatherbound.

So, while I know some of you might be skeptical about this like I was, I ask you to give us a chance to show why it will be a good thing. Our goal will not be to move to Kickstarter for all leatherbounds, only Stormlight leatherbounds every three years—because the added size, complexity, and logistics of such a large book require us to have some extra help. We plan to launch The Way of Kings as a Kickstarter in the summer of 2020, probably June or July. The book will likely come in two volumes, and will have to be around double the cost of our previous leatherbounds. (So, $200 to $250 instead of $100.) I thought it only fair to warn you all up front. Plus, if we hear concerns from the community that we haven’t considered, announcing it this early will help us deal with those before the actual campaign.

To that end, I have a little mini FAQ dealing with issues I think you might have.

Q: You are doing the Kickstarter in the summer. When will the books be sent out?

The goal will be to start sending these out as soon as possible, hopefully months before the holidays arrive. We are going to put our order in as soon as we can for the books themselves, and get the incentives constructed ASAP. Ideally, we’ll send you a single box with book and rewards all together in one cool bundle.

There will be some digital rewards offered as well. These will be sent out the moment the campaign closes, and will hopefully tide you over until the physical products arrive.

Q: Will this leatherbound be available on your store later, like the others?

Yes, it will. If you miss the campaign, you’ll still be able to buy the book.

Some things might not be available in the later printing, however, depending on what incentives we offer for the Kickstarter. For example, we will possibly offer a slipcase as part of the Kickstarter incentives—but (depending on the size of future print runs) we might not be able to offer that with the later editions we sell in the store. In short, the book will totally be there for you to buy later—but any stretch goal achievements and swag associated with the Kickstarter would have to come from that campaign. (With one exception mentioned below.)

Q: I like supporting my local independent bookseller. Will any stores be getting this book like they have other leatherbounds you’ve done?

I haven’t cleared this with any of the stores yet, so I don’t want to speak for them. However, we love our bookstores, and have tried from the get-go to involve them in our leatherbound distribution. Our goal will be to set aside a certain number of books as requested by the booksellers we work with frequently. (And if you’re a bookseller who has had me in your store for a signing in the past, and you would like to be selling these leatherbounds too, make sure to contact us.)

My goal will be to add all bookseller orders into the final count from the Kickstarter, and order an equivalent number of physical reward objects for them to include with their books. So these bookstore editions should include all unlocked stretch goal rewards in the boxes we send for them to sell. They might not be personalized to your preferences (e.g. you might receive a random order of Knights Radiant, based on the box you get), but we hope this will work so that readers who prefer to buy from the booksellers do not feel left out.

The short version is this: if you miss the Kickstarter, there’s a good chance that a limited number of boxes with full rewards included will be available at retailers, for the same price people paid in the Kickstarter. Those stores should be similar to the ones that have been carrying our leatherbounds so far.

Q: Leatherbounds are expensive. Will I be able to participate if I’m not interested in such a high ticket item?

My plan is to write a Stormlight (or at least Cosmere) novella next spring to offer as part of the Kickstarter campaign. We’re anticipating some lower tiers that involve getting digital-only rewards and a digital copy of the novella—all for a very reasonable price. We will likely also offer just the novella in print form, along with all campaign rewards, as another slightly higher (but still well below $200) tier that you can buy into as well. (And, of course, a tier that has everything—including the leatherbound and a print copy of the novella.)

Q: So…a novella you say. Anything else you can tell us about the rewards?

We haven’t settled on anything yet. I haven’t even written the novella, so it’s possible that won’t even happen. However, it’s likely that we’ll be letting you choose an order of Knights Radiant (and we’ll post full descriptions of all ten orders, including information not yet in the books) and receive rewards based on your preference (i.e. physical rewards with that order’s symbols on them).

There’s also a decent chance I’ll offer an ebook of The Way of Kings Prime (the version I wrote of the book back in 2002 that is way different from the 2010 version) as a stretch goal unlock. This would be sent to everyone who participates in the campaign at any level.

Okay, if you’re still with me after that (we’re over a thousand words into this SotS already, and I haven’t even really started yet), let’s talk about the survey. After The Way of Kings, the next book to hit its ten-year anniversary is The Alloy of Law. Instead of being a lot larger than the average Sanderson book, AoL is half the size. We aren’t allowed by Tor to sell our leatherbounds for less than $100, and the logistics of printing them kind of preclude that anyway.

However, I thought that perhaps you all would like to get The Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self bundled together as a single leatherbound. I figured if we have to charge double for a double-sized stormlight book, shouldn’t we charge half for a half-sized mistborn book? This would require binding the two books together though.

Assistant Adam, who is a leatherbound connoisseur, mentioned that some people might not like this—he thought the leatherbound collectors he knows would just prefer to have the individual books, separate as they’re sold in stores, for their collection. So, we thought we’d ask you. The survey below is getting at this idea. The questions are very simple, so feel free to look them over before taking it.

Finally, a couple of questions for those of you who attend my book signings. I’m having some growing pains in this department. My signings, put flatly, are just getting too long for me to handle. The last Stormlight tour wore me out, with each signing lasting until 1 or 2 a.m., with signs that they were going to grow even larger. I need to do something to either speed up the lines, or make the signings easier.

Fortunately, I have some guides in this department. I’m fortunate enough to be approaching crowds similar to the ones GRRM or Neil Gaiman get, and talking to people like them, I’ve found that there are two approaches authors generally use. Neil, for example, will pre-sign all the books. You don’t get to meet him personally at a signing, but instead you get a signed book—and then he does an extra-long presentation, with much longer readings, Q&As, and speeches than I do. In short, it becomes “an evening with Neil” instead of a book signing. Other authors (I know George has done this) still sign all the books, but don’t do a presentation at all, and don’t allow personalizations or pictures.

I’m curious what all of you think. My own inclination is a hybrid of my current method and Neil’s method—where I do a longer presentation like Neil does, perhaps bringing Isaac to do a presentation on artwork too. Then have a lottery (which is not based on your ability to buy a more expensive ticket, and is instead completely random) for a hundred people to come meet me afterward and get a book personalized.

If you’re interested, I’d enjoy you answering some questions about this too. (Note that none of these apply to release parties, which will continue to be the insane and enormous extravaganzas you’ve come to expect.)

Okay, whew. Thanks for sticking through all of that for me. But we spend a lot of time on the leatherbounds, and want to make sure we’re creating them the way you want. Now, on to the regular State of the Sanderson.

Part Two: My Year

January–March: Starsight Revisions

My goal had been to launch straight into Stormlight Four in January, but I didn’t quite make it. We thought we had the book wrapped up by February, but some of the beta reader comments set me thinking about several problems with Starsight—and I made the tough call to do another round of revisions on the book to make it as good as it could be. This put me about a month behind; I’d built in a buffer, but had really wanted to start on Stormlight Four in February. (I even had a trip to Hawaii planned to kick it off—as nothing is better than writing on the beach. Alas, though I got a tad of Stormlight done on that trip, I spent most of it on Starsight.)

But the revisions worked, and the book finally clicked into place. Judging from the reader responses, it feels like that extra month really paid some dividends, so I’m glad I did it.

April: Stormlight 4

The real work on Stormlight 4 started in April, where I launched into Part One. Writing went pretty good from the get-go, as I’m always kind of working on Stormlight outlines—even when I’m writing other books. So I can often hit the ground running. Stormlight books literally have two decades of planning behind them.

May: Europe Trip One (Germany)

This trip was a lot of fun—and Art Director Isaac went with me, as he speaks German. The fans were enthusiastic, and the tour was a huge success. But it did also slow me down a ton. Not much written this month.

June: Stormlight 4

I got back into it, eventually managing to catch up all the lost time from Germany. (Though I was still about a month behind because of the Starsight revision.) I might have caught all the way up, except…

July: Europe Trip Two (Spain/France/Belgium)

Another big trip through Europe, though about half of this one was vacation rather than work. My father was a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France and Belgium when he was in his twenties. Now that he’s retired, we wanted to take him back to show us around. Spain was a work trip for me (one of my favorite SF/F conventions is in Spain, and I love going there).

August–September: Stormlight 4

I jumped back into it, and despite a little detour at Dragon Con in September (the hotel room they gave me was amazing—check out my view above!). I managed to catch all the way back up on lost time, and then on October 9th caught up (finally) from the lost month in March, putting me 100% on track to finish the book by January 1st. But then on October 11th, I flew back out on tour…

October: Israel, Europe Trip Three (France, the Czech Republic)

I’ve always wanted to go to Israel, and locked in about two years ago to be a guest at a convention in Tel Aviv. The trip was great, really special—and was followed by the utterly cool chance to go visit the Wheel of Time television show set in Prague. So while I had a great time, it was a little hard to admit it put me behind again by a month.

Here are some photos from my tours and conventions!

November, December: Stormlight 4

I’ve finally caught up again as of last week, and am making the final push to finish the novel. It’s been touch-and-go all year, but I’m confident now that the book will be finished by January, which is why I let Tor announce a release date. (See below.)

All in all, it was a great year—despite being a bit frantic and putting me on way too many airplanes. (The odd part is that after all of this touring, I have a ton of frequent flyer miles—but I’m often too tired of travel to use them, so my family/assistants end up using them for trips.) At the same time, I really do love working on Stormlight books. One of the reasons I take such a long break between them is to make certain that when I come back to Roshar, I’m refreshed and eager to get back to it. And speaking of that…

Part Three: Updates on Major Projects

The Stormlight Archive

Book Four has a release date next year on November 17th. I allowed Tor to set this because I’m confident that we’ll meet it—so we should be in good shape for that release, barring some catastrophic responses that I haven’t anticipated during alpha/beta reads. The tentative title for the book is still Rhythm of War, but because of the way Stormlight books work (where each book title is an in-world book title as well), I can’t 100% say that will be the title in this case until the book is finished.

When Book Four is done, we’ll have only one more book in the first Stormlight sequence. As I’ve been saying for years, Book Five is one of the major end points of the series. I anticipate writing that in 2022, for a 2023 release. Yes, I know, many of you wish those gaps were shorter. It’s turned out that a three-year gap is best for my writing psychology, so we’re going to stick with that for now. And, since they’re each as long as four regular books, it’s like getting a Stormlight book faster than one per year—except you have to save them up to read in batches.

STATUS: All systems go!

Mistborn

I had hoped to squeeze in Wax and Wayne Four this year, but falling behind a month (plus the aggressive tour schedule) made that impossible. I sometimes forget just how much touring takes out of me—which is partly why there wasn’t a Starsight tour. (And partly why I put that question in the survey about how to make book tours a little less exhausting.)

I consider Wax and Wayne’s final book to be imperative to finish before I start Stormlight Five. Starting in July, once Stormlight Four is fully revised and turned in, I’ll have two main projects demanding my attention. Wax and Wayne four is one of those, Skyward is the other. (I might need to get to Skyward Three before it, FYI, depending on how much Stormlight burns me out on epic fantasy. But both Skyward Three and Wax and Wayne Four should be finished by the end of the year next year.)

After that, it will be time for me to be looking to Era Three of Mistborn—which will be written in the years between Stormlight Five and Stormlight Six.

STATUS: Wayne is threatening to beat me up if I don’t get to this soon. 2021 or maybe 2022 release for the final book.

Skyward

Book Two is out, if you somehow missed that fact. I’d like to say thank you to everyone for indulging me so much on my side projects. Starsight was a huge success, even without me touring for it. These books are really fun to write, and good for my writing as they allow me to relax between big Cosmere projects. The fact that all of you are willing to embrace and read them is quite gratifying. One of my biggest fears becoming an author was that I’d get locked into doing only one thing, then get burned out on it.

As you can see from the last 15 years of my publishing career, I am interested in a lot of different things. The fact that you’ve been willing to read about Spin, Jerkface, and Doomslug as readily as you do about Kaladin, Dalinar, and Shallan is wonderful to see. Thank you so much for making this new series a success.

STATUS: Should write Book Three sometime late next year. 2021 release is likely.

Part Four: Updates on Secondary Projects

Dark One

We’re moving ahead with the graphic novel on this, and giving you some glimpses of that is one of the big things I’m happy to announce for this State of the Sanderson. We’ve included some gorgeous pages below. The graphic novel is turning out to be something really special. We don’t have an exact release date for this yet, but it shouldn’t be too much longer before we can announce one.

In addition, many of you may have heard the news that J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon Five, among many other cool projects) is attached to this project to make a television show. The same outline I came up with for the graphic novel drew serious Hollywood attention, which is how this happened. That said, JMS has other projects he’s working on as well, and Dark One needs to wait for the right time for him to work on it.

STATUS: Real motion here. Exciting developments in the process!

Songs of the Dead (Was Death by Pizza)

This perpetual entry in the State of the Sanderson is creeping ever closer to being a reality. My co-author, Peter Orullian, has suggested the title Songs of the Dead—which is a really great title, considering it’s about a heavy metal singer necromancer.

We’ve got a second draft done, but it needs a third one. Unfortunately, the hangup is me, as Stormlight has taken basically all my time this year. Peter sent me his latest draft in June or so, and I’m only halfway through my revision of it at this point. So I’m sorry it’s taking so long; I’m excited for you all to read the book, but as it’s my first true book collaboration, there are some growing pains as we figure out how to make the process work right for us.

Hopefully I can finish my next revision early next year, send it back to Peter for one final draft, then begin showing it to editors.

STATUS: Waiting on my next revision.

The Original

This novella that I wrote with the fantastic Mary Robinette Kowal is finished and being recorded as an audio original. It should come out very soon, and I’m quite proud of it.

I’m a little annoyed as the Will Smith movie that came out earlier this year has a similar premise. But that movie bombed and apparently wasn’t very good. So maybe people will appreciate a similar idea done right? We’ll see. I had hoped to get this out before Mr. Smith’s movie came out, but Mary Robinette was busy winning all of the awards for her excellent Lady Astronaut series, and I was busy getting rained on in Roshar.

STATUS: Out soon.

Alcatraz Six

This one is mostly done, just needing a few little tweaks. Again, I haven’t had a ton of time last year, but this one is looking really good. It’s basically all complete, only needing one last pass. We should be doing the interior artwork and editorial work next year.

STATUS: Basically done.

Elantris, Warbreaker, The Rithmatist

No updates from last year, I’m afraid. There was no intention to make progress on these this year. Once Alcatraz is wrapped up, I’ll turn my attention back to The Rithmatist as the last looming series that needs a wrapup that hasn’t gotten one. Elantris and Warbreaker sequels aren’t to be expected until Stormlight Five and Wax and Wayne Four are done.

I know a lot of you keep waiting on Rithmatist news, and I feel bad having to give you the same news every year. (Yes, that paragraph above is the same one I put in the State of the Sanderson last year.) But the truth is, I really can’t work on this until at the very least Alcatraz is finished.

A glimmer of light for you Rithmatist fans is this: my son just read the book, and he’s joined the crowd calling for me to do a sequel. So you have an in-house representative.

STATUS: Keep Waiting. (Sorry again, again.)

White Sand

Graphic novel three is out now! So if you haven’t picked it up, please check it out!

We’ve learned a lot doing our first graphic novel series. Again, there were some growing pains. (We aren’t thrilled, for example, by how often we ended up needing to change artists.) The good news is that we really enjoy doing these, and so we are planning to do another graphic novel series set on Taldain, visiting darkside and dealing with Khriss and her adventures there. So if you are one of those people who read the prose version years ago, and have been waiting for some resolution, Isaac and I are outlining a sequel series right now.

STATUS: Trilogy complete, likely to do a collection of all three in coming years. Sequel series being outlined.

Part Five: Updates on Minor Projects

For many of these little projects, you may want to glance back at previous State of the Sanderson documents to see what they even are, as this is pretty long already and I don’t want to keep making the same pitch every year. So really, take note if a specific idea interested you, but don’t worry if you’re confused and you don’t get many details here on these.

The Reckoners, Legion

Both are completed. Though I’ve had enough people asking after them that we’re toying with doing some audio-original novellas set in these worlds. For example, one of my big goals for Legion was to get it made into a television series. While that could still happen, as it’s under option by a production company, I’ve been thinking that maybe I could do something like that on my own—as an audio series. We could create a sequence of episodes written by a writer’s room with me as the “showrunner.” I could see doing something like this with the Reckoners to continue that story, for those who want to know what happens next.

If we can get these off the ground, I’ll let you know. Also, if you like The Original, please let me know—as that will influence me in doing similar projects with Legion and the Reckoners.

STATUS: Completed, but cool things could still happen.

Adamant

No change from last year. This space opera series of novellas is in limbo until I find the right time to work on them. It will happen eventually.

STATUS: No movement.

Starburner/Soulburner

Something’s happening here, but it’s hush-hush for now.

The Apocalypse Guard

Well, this book got weirder—as expected with Dan and me working together on something. It’s moved to the back burner, as even Dan’s revision wasn’t enough to get it where we want it to be. So this one is entering limbo for now.

STATUS: No motion for months now, might be dead.

Other Projects

Untitled Threnody Novel, Sixth of the Dusk sequel, another story with Shai, and The Silence Divine persist as “maybe” stories that someday I might write. They are joined by a Secret Standalone Cosmere Book, that wacky YA Cosmere Book with Magic Kites, Untitled First of the Sun YA novel (not involving Sixth), and a few others as Cosmere novels that might someday make it to the front burner. (Once Skyward is done, I think it would be good to do a YA book in the Cosmere, so I’ve begun working on possible ideas.) Aether of Night also is still hanging around, maybe needing a novel. So we’ll see. I’ll talk a little more about the Cosmere in a future section, after we get to the film stuff.

If I write a novella to go with the Stormlight Kickstarter, it has about an equal chance of being Wandersail (a Rysn novella), Horneater (a Rock novella), or a sequel to Sixth of the Dusk (which is tricky because it reveals maybe a little too much about Space Age Cosmere politics).

Part Six: Film/Television

Note: read last year’s State of the Sanderson for more talk on what it takes to make a film or television show out of a novel. However, the biggest news here is that I’ve decided to try taking a more active role in getting some of these made. To that end, I’ve most specifically been working closer with Dan Mintz, the producer who is trying to get some Cosmere things made. See below.

Snapshot

New screenplay has been written, and is being shopped to directors right now, so far as I know. Still under option by MGM, and looking good—but no real updates.

Stormlight Archive

I’ve offered Dan Mintz to do treatments for this myself, and he’s been very amenable. He and I have been working more closely together lately to see if we can make this happen.

Steelheart

Option lapsed at Fox just last month. This wasn’t surprising, as after the Fox/Disney merger, there wasn’t much of a chance that Disney would greenlight a non-Marvel superhero project. Instead of immediately going out to shop this again though, I’m taking a few months to consider how I want to approach film and television.

Legion

Still under option to Cineflix Media. No updates lately.

Skyward

Deal is in the works, but can’t talk about it yet.

Alcatraz

Likewise, deal is in the works, but can’t talk about it yet.

Dark One

Working on this with JMS, which has been super cool.

Mistborn

Considering maybe writing the screenplay on this myself. After speaking with Dan Mintz, we decided he would focus on spearheading Stormlight, and I would focus on spearheading Mistborn. So we’ll see what I decide to do.

Part Seven: Other Cool Projects

Stormlight Children’s Book

A publisher Isaac has worked with doing picture books asked if maybe we could do an adaptation of “the girl who looked up” story that Shallan and Wit tell in Oathbringer. We thought this was a pretty cool idea, and so Isaac is working on the adaptation. If we do this right, it could come out around the same time as Book Four.

Brotherwise Call to Adventure Board Game

This summer, Brotherwise Games will release Call to Adventure: The Stormlight Archive. Originally planned as an expansion for the board game Call to Adventure, it has grown into a full standalone game with 120 cards and everything you need to play. Call to Adventure is a hero-crafting game that combines strategy and storytelling. It’s similar to some “tableau-building” games where you’re creating a kingdom or civilization, but in this game you’re building a character. Each player begins with cards that define your hero’s origin, motivation, and destiny. Over the course of the game, you overcome challenges and gain traits. It’s a game with points and a clear winner, but the highlight of every game is telling your hero’s story at the end.

The guys at Brotherwise are huge fans, and they’ve worked closely with us to make sure the Stormlight Archive game is true to the books. It emphasizes cooperative play as players become Radiants and face Odium, but it’s possible to choose a villainous path and work against the team. The cards are all inspired by familiar scenes and themes, and in Call to Adventure you’re piecing together those moments to tell new stories. Here’s a sneak peek at illustrations for some of the cards: Choose A Side (Ganna Pazyniuk), Herald of Justice (Petar Penev), Face the Unmade(Artem Demura), Leader (Ari Ibarra), Elsecaller (Randy Vargas), and One More Try (Artem Demura). Expect more news on the game closer to its release date in summer 2020!

Crafty Games Dice Kickstarter

If you’re reading this when it comes out, know that you’ve only got a few hours left to get in on the Mistborn dice Kickstarter (and help them try to meet their final stretch goal). This should be the last Kickstarter we do for anything until we reach the Stormlight one in the summer.

Crafty has been doing great work on the RPG front, and have been an excellent partner. If you’re at all interested in dice, have a look at their Kickstarter. I’m really looking forward to getting mine!

Part Eight: Projected Schedule of Releases

• The Original audio novella: 2020
• Stormlight Four: Fall 2020
• Skyward Three: Summer(?) 2021
• Wax and Wayne Four: Fall(?) 2021
• Alcatraz 6: 2021–2022
• Dark One Graphic Novel: 2021–2022
• Skyward Four (final book): 2022
• Stormlight Five: Fall 2023

Part Nine: Bonus Section, The Future of the Cosmere

One thing you might have noticed in the secondary projects section is that I have a number of collaborations in the works. This is partially because I wanted the chance to work with some of my friends on books, which is a fun and different way to write. But it’s also because I’ve begun to realize that I need to keep more of my focus on the Cosmere.

That isn’t to say I’m not going to write anything that isn’t Cosmere moving forward. (Skyward proves that.) At the same time, these State of the Sanderson posts come out on my birthday each year—and as I age, I’m growing more aware that I won’t be able to write all the books I want to. I’m still relatively young, and relatively fast as a writer.

Let me explain. Back in my 30s, I generally didn’t worry that I wouldn’t be able to finish things I started—that wasn’t even something that occurred to me. I just wrote whatever I wanted at the time I wanted to write it. Now I’m in my 40s, and I’ve realized that the Cosmere is also a big project. Back in the summer of 2007—before I even had kids and before the Wheel of Time came my way—I first sat down and asked myself, “How big is the Cosmere?” I came up with an outline of between 32 and 36 books. That seemed like an easy task. At two books a year, that would barely be fifteen years out of my (hopefully) very long career.

But I was somewhat naive then about a number of things. I didn’t realize just how much effort Stormlight books would take to write. I didn’t realize how much time touring would eat out of my schedule as I grew more popular. I didn’t realize how many other things might take my attention, like doing films.

A few years after that 2007 outline, I realized that I needed to start writing some of my side projects as novellas, rather than novel series with promised sequels. (Things like The Emperor’s Soul and Sixth of the Dusk grew out of that realization.) Lately, I’ve begun asking myself on some of my ideas, “Could I do this as a collaboration? As an audio original or graphic novel?” These are other ways to tell my stories, but to do so in a manner that takes less of my direct time. You’re all going to have to tell me if you like the products of this effort. I can’t stop doing side projects; as I’ve said many times, this is how I prevent myself from burning out. But maybe I can make the deviations I take to do those side projects a little less time-consuming.

For what it’s worth, here is what I have as the current Cosmere sequence, not counting potential YA books or the occasional novella. Finished books are in bold. This isn’t an exact chronology of when I’ll write them either.

• Elantris 1
• Elantris 2
• Elantris 3
• Mistborn Era 1: Book One
• Mistborn Era 1: Book Two
• Mistborn Era 1: Book Three
• Stormlight One
• Stormlight Two
• Stormlight Three
• Stormlight Four
• Stormlight Five
• Mistborn Era 2: Book One
• Mistborn Era 2: Book Two
• Mistborn Era 2: Book Three
• Mistborn Era 2: Book Four
• Warbreaker 1
• Warbreaker 2
• Mistborn Era 3: Book One
• Mistborn Era 3: Book Two
• Mistborn Era 3: Book Three
• Stormlight Six
• Stormlight Seven
• Stormlight Eight
• Stormlight Nine
• Stormlight Ten
• Dragonsteel Book One
• Dragonsteel Book Two
• Dragonsteel Book Three
• Untitled Threnody Novel
• Untitled Aether Book One
• Untitled Aether Book Two
• Untitled Aether Book Three
• Mistborn Era 4: Book One
• Mistborn Era 4: Book Two
• Mistborn Era 4: Book Three

That’s thirty-five novels. The original outline I made in 2007 had a maximum of thirty-six, but was a little different. For example, I had Dragonsteel in my mind as seven books back then—but as I progressed through the Cosmere I quickly realized that I was offloading a lot of that story to Stormlight. (Bridge Four, remember, started on Yolen—the Dragonsteel world. So did Dalinar, actually.)

I’ve shrunk Dragonsteel to a trilogy as I focused on what I wanted it to be: a compelling story about Hoid and his origins. (Along with the shattering of Adonalsium.) That snapped Dragonsteel into place in the Cosmere quite nicely. This is why I’m still at around the same number of mainline novels even after adding the Wax and Wayne books.

The original outline didn’t name the Threnody novel as such; that slot was filled by a standalone where I planned to do some of the things I’ll now accomplish. In the original outline I had White Sand, but that became a graphic novel series. This, plus my uncertainty at the start if there would be other standalone novels, indicates why I had a 32–36-book series in mind at the start, but now have 35 “mainline” Cosmere books. (Another point I’ve wavered on is where Aether fits into this.)

That makes eleven books in the Cosmere finished in the last 15 years, less than a third of the full Cosmere sequence. This means, at this speed, I’ve got at least another thirty years of writing to do—putting me optimistically at age seventy-four when I finish. (Assuming I don’t add anything else, like a Mistborn cyberpunk between eras three and four—or a standalone or two, which I’d really like to be doing more.)

So, perhaps you can see why I feel a need to start focusing a little more attention on the Cosmere. I don’t want the years to slip away from me, and right now seems the time I need to be thinking about this—not when I hit sixty and realize I’ve been ignoring one series or another.

I write this out not to scare you. (Hopefully.) One of the reasons I divided it all up into separate sequences, even within the same series, is so that we’ll have endings and be able to “complete” series, rather than leaving you hanging forever, feeling like these things are going on too long. At the same time, the Cosmere is my life’s work—and from the get-go, I wanted it to be epic in every sense of the word.

I hope you are enjoying the journey, because I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

Thank you all for another fantastic year.

Brandon

Adam here. Nominations for the 2019 Hugo Awards close tonight at 11:59 Pacific Daylight Time. A few months ago Brandon wrote short blog about his works that were up for various award eligibility which you can read in full here, but I will give brief bullet points below.

• Skyward is eligible for various awards, including the Andre Norton Award and the award for Best Young Adult book that is given out alongside the Hugos.
• Children of the Nameless would be eligible in various novella categories. As it was released for free, you can download it here.
• Legion: the Many Lives of Stephen Leeds was released as a novel, and is eligible as such.
• The graphic novel White Sand Vo. 2 is also eligible for nomination this year.
• And as usual, you can nominate Writing Excuses in the Best Related Work category.

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Magic Systems, Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mahtab design magic systems! They talk about how they do it, and how the principles of magic system design apply to the science fiction systems they create, and vice-versa.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread of Oathbringer, featured Hoid, our favorite world-hopper who’s never straight forward about anything, and he’s certainly in rare form dropped hints about everything from his age to his role in the Cosmere. And along the way, he imparted a bit of wholesome advice to Shallan, nestled in amongst the jokes and snark. This week, in chapter sixty-nine, Kaladin experiments with Stormlight to determine what will draw the Voidbringers, and determines that Lashing a rock is out of the question. The team returns to the tailor’s shop to change their clothing, and Shallan sets their disguises to match. The men are off to a party, which makes Kaladin no end of grumpy; he ducks out of the party gig and ends up meeting the Wall Guard.

Today’s featured cosplay of Vin is brought to you by 17thsharder Stormwatcher.

Introduction

Another year has passed, and Koloss Head Munching Day is upon us again. It’s been a fun year, full of me working on interesting side projects, so expect quite the list of updates in this (very long) post. But first, let me give a hearty thank you to the community of readers that continues to put up with my sometimes insane writing process. I realize it results in me having a lot of projects, necessitating posts like this one to keep everyone up to date. For many writers, this might be an overwhelming number of irons in the proverbial fire—but it is exactly what I need to keep me excited about the process, and to keep me from burning out.

Know, however, that I realize this can be a little frustrating if you’re waiting for one specific update that keeps not happening. It’s quite the challenge to keep all this straight, but I do my best to keep in mind that by beginning something, I make an implicit promise that I will finish it. I take this promise seriously. I will do my best to balance my artistic needs with the trust you’ve all shown me by continuing to support my work. I consider this post, along with updates on places like my subreddit, to be essential parts of this process. I often cannot rush the artistic process, but I can keep you all informed of what is causing delays, or what projects I find exciting. This is how I make myself accountable to you, as you are the means by which I even get to do this wonderful job in the first place.

So, introduction done, here we go! Let the circus commence.

My Year

January-March: Skyward and Legion Revisions
I kicked off the year quickly doing a second draft of Skyward. Pulling The Apocalypse Guard from the publisher, then promising them Skyward to publish in the fall of 2018, meant that I had to scramble. It wouldn’t do to pull a book I judged to be of inferior quality, only to replace it with a book that I didn’t have time to revise up to my standards. So you’ll see a number of months dedicated to Skyward. (Which, if you somehow missed it, did come out—and is still sitting quite happily on the New York Times bestseller list many weeks later, so thank you all very much!)

Another thing I’d been putting off for months was the necessary revisions of the third Legion story. Tor was quite patient with me on this one, considering the Legion collection was scheduled for publication in the fall as well. But during these three months, I did multiple revisions of both books, eventually getting Legion into a polished state. (There was one more draft of Skyward still to do.) Legion Three, Lies of the Beholder, can be found in the Legion collection that was published earlier this year.

Finally, somewhere in here, I squeezed in an outline and world guide for Death Without Pizza. (Yes, that’s a name change—no it’s not the final name, but just a placeholder.) More on that later.

April: Children of the Nameless
Sometime around March of last year, Wizards of the Coast sent me an exploratory email. It being the 25th anniversary of their card game, they were wondering if I’d be interested in doing a story with them. As most of you know, I’m quite the fan of Magic: The Gathering. It’s my primary hobby, and I have way too many cards. (Which still aren’t enough, of course.) I was enthusiastic, and you can read more about the process I used to approach the story in this blog post.

I knew that by doing so, and by writing the story as long as it ended up, it would make getting to some of my other projects later in the year more difficult. (Namely, the fourth Wax and Wayne book, which I’ll talk about shortly.) But this was kind of something I had to do, so I ask your forgiveness in taking this detour to Innistrad. I’m exceptionally pleased with the story and the response it has gotten, so if you haven’t read it, I present it to you here! Reading it requires no prior knowledge of the card came or the lore surrounding it.

May: Skyward Final Draft
How long it takes to write a story depends on a lot of factors, but in general, three months gets me around 100k words. Shorter stories, with fewer viewpoints, tend to be faster—while longer stories with more intricate plotlines (like Stormlight) tend to take longer. But that’s just for the rough draft. Generally, doing all the other drafts takes an equivalent amount of time to the first draft. (So, if the first draft takes three months, the second through fourth drafts will together take another three months.) You can see this at play in Skyward, which took about three months to write in the end of 2017, then took three additional months of revision to polish up.

I did sneak in a little time to do an outline for a piece called The Original in here as well, which took about a week. I’ll update you on that in the secondary projects section.

June–August: Starsight First Draft
And, speaking of three month first drafts, here we get me buckling down and doing the sequel to Skyward. It’s finished in its first draft form, and dominated my summer. In here, I also did detailed outlines for the third and fourth books of the series. (And this is where I determined for certain that the series would need to be four books instead of three.)

September–October: Odds and Ends
In these months I had some travel to record episodes of Writing Excuses, I did a quick second draft of Starsight to send to my publisher, and I did some revisions to Children of the Nameless. I also did more work on The Original, Death Without Pizza, and Alcatraz Six (AKA Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians, or Alcatraz vs. His Own Dumb Self). Finally, I slipped in some brainstorming with Dan Wells on how to fix The Apocalypse Guard.

Basically, I knew that November would be mostly lost to touring, and I was scrambling to get some work done on small projects to clear my plate for 2019, which will be dedicated to working on Stormlight Four.

November: Skyward Tour
I spent most of November on tour for Skyward, and quickly finishing up final revisions on Children of the Nameless. I got to see a lot of you while touring for the book, and had a blast—but these tours get more and more difficult as the lines get longer and longer. The tour for Stormlight Four in 2020 might require me to do some things I’ve been dreading, such as limit the lines to a certain number of tickets. It makes me sad to contemplate, but I’ll keep you all in the loop about what we decide to do.

That said, here are some pictures from my tour! Let the costume parade commence:

Syl – Barnes & Noble, El Cerrito

Mistborn – University Bookstore, Seattle

Shallan and Jasnah – University Bookstore, Seattle

Cobalt Guard – University Bookstore, Seattle

Spensa Nightshade – Anderson’s Bookshop, Chicago

Mistborn – Barnes & Noble, Atlanta

Wax – Barnes & Noble, Atlanta

Shallan – Murder by the Book, Houston

Australia(?) and Bastille – Murder by the Book, Houston

Mistborn – Murder by the Book, Houston

December: Death Without Pizza
I needed a break from all the other things I’ve been doing, so in classic Brandon style, I worked on something fresh and new to give myself a breather. This was where I was going to do Wax and Wayne Four, but doing Children of the Nameless meant that instead of three months extra space at the end of the year, I only had one month. (As CotN had taken one month to write, and one month to revise.) I had the choice of pushing back the start of Stormlight Four, or doing something else for this month and trying to sneak in W&W 4 sometime next year. I chose the latter. It’s important to me that I let myself do side projects to refresh myself—but I also think it’s important to keep to my Stormlight schedule. It would be too easy to keep putting off the big books until they stretch to years in the making. I told myself I was going to divide my time in half between Stormlight and other projects.

The truth is, I’m getting really anxious about getting back to Stormlight. That’s a very good sign, as once I finish a Stormlight book, I’m usually feeling quite burned out on the setting, and need a number of months to recover.

Anyway, that’s where the year went! Now, on to the exciting part. The big list of projects and updates to them.

Updates on Main Projects

Stormlight
As you just read about above, I am on track for starting this book on January first. I’ll begin with a reread of the first three books, as I find I need a periodic refresher, even on my own novels. This will also be important for helping me really nail down the outlines for books four and five.

As I’ve worked on the Stormlight series, I’ve shifted a lot of things around in the outlines. Famously, I swapped Dalinar’s book and Szeth’s book (making Book Three have Dalinar’s flashbacks instead of Szeth’s). But along the same lines, I moved a chunk of Book Three into Book Two, and then moved around smaller arcs for Three, Four, and Five.

The Stormlight series has a very odd structure. Each novel is outlined as a trilogy plus a short story collection (the interludes) and is the length of four regular books. This lets me play with narrative in some interesting ways—but it also makes each volume a beast to write. The other superstructure to the series is the spotlight on the ten orders of Radiants, with each book highlighting one of them while also having a flashback sequences for a character tied to one of those orders. If that weren’t complicated enough, the series is organized in two major five-book arcs.

What this means is that I need to do some extra work on books four and five, as they together tie off an arc. There are some small plot lines I’ve been pushing back from book to book as I nail down what each volume will include—but I can’t do that with Book Five, as it will be the capstone of this sequence. So I need the outlines to be tight to make certain I get everything into them that needs to be there.

Anyway, that’s a long way to say, essentially, I’ll start posting updates to the Stormlight subreddit in January, and you can follow along there or on the progress bar we’ll post here on my website on January first. I’ve commissioned a special piece of artwork to be used in Stormlight Four blog posts, which we should be able to reveal next year. (I’m pretty excited about it.) So you have that to look forward to as well!

Note that while I’m optimistic about this being my fall 2020 release, delays could happen if the book doesn’t come out smoothly on the first draft. I’ll keep you updated with regular posts. A lot will depend on how long the revisions take.

Status: Book Four is my main project for 2019, for an anticipated 2020/2021 release.

Mistborn
My big failure in 2018 was not getting to Wax and Wayne Four. But all is not lost! I am going to do whatever I can to squeeze this in next year. I’m feeling I might need a break in the middle of Stormlight Four, as I sometimes do. If so, I might squeeze this in there. But it will depend on a many factors. So, we’ll have to take a wait-and-see attitude.

I’m going to try to hold myself back from doing any other side projects, like Children of the Nameless or The Original from this year, until Wax and Wayne is finished. Book Four will be the conclusion of their story, and the wrap-up of era two of Mistborn. (And I have big things planned for Era Three, which I am planning to write between Stormlight Five and Stormlight Six.)

Status: Pushed off for now, but to be written very soon. No release date yet.

Skyward
Book Two, Starsight, is done, and I’ll be noodling on revisions for it in the early part of next year while I write the Stormlight Four and Five outlines. It’s scheduled for October of next year.

Stormlight Four taking all of my 2019 will likely mean that Skyward Three won’t be written until 2020, for a spring 2021 release. (At least, that would be my best guess at this point.) So you’ll have a larger-than-usual wait between Books Two and Three, unless something happens to let me squeeze Book Three in early. As I mentioned above, it’s a four-book series, and when I get back to it, I anticipate doing Book Four soon after Book Three. (Like I did in writing Books One and Two very close to one another.)

Status: Book Two ready to go in 2019. Book Three likely in 2021, Book Four likely in 2022.

Death (Without Pizza)
A major bombshell update here: we have finished a first draft of this book! I’m moving this up to major projects, as I anticipate a release of this novel in the coming two years. It is a Dresden Files-esque urban fantasy series set in London, starring a necromancer. (With a very Sanderson-style take on necromancy.)

Many of you have been following along with this project, which I’ve mentioned for many years in the State of the Sanderson posts. I wrote a rough draft of a big chunk of this book back some years ago now, but didn’t like how it was going, so I shelved it. The idea stuck with me though—and I really wanted to give it another chance. Over the years, one part I didn’t like was actually the pizza aspect. The original pitch was for a pizza delivery man who became a necromancer.

Well, over the years, I found I wanted a stronger character for the protagonist. Starting with the title Death by Pizza had pushed me to make the story more jokey than I wanted, and had led me to cut corners on the worldbuilding in ways I didn’t like. So when I went back to the drawing board, I started going in different directions with the storytelling. A more intricate, interesting magic system. And a character with more heart. Where I eventually ended up going was studying metal music culture.

The subculture of heavy metal music is fascinating to me. I really like how passionate the fans are about it, and how often outsiders are wrong about those inside it. (Do a little reading on the topic, and you might find that a lot of your stereotypes of metal fans are wrong—like mine were. The more I read about and talked to metal fans, the more fascinated I became by the subculture.) It seemed to me that a metalhead who finds out he’s a necromancer could be a cool hook.

Well, around the time I was really getting into this, I was chatting with Peter Orullian, a novelist who is a friend of mine. He’s mostly known for his epic fantasy series The Vault of Heaven, but he also happens to be a metalhead and a musician. (He’s toured internationally fronting metal bands, and recently composed an entire rock opera in the style of Trans-Siberian Orchestra. He’s even written a book with the band Dream Theater, in conjunction with one of their concept albums.)

Well, the match seemed perfect. He could bring the expertise on metal music, and I could provide the worldbuilding. So we jumped into a collaboration. I wrote out a lengthy world guide and outline, and Peter did a lot of experimenting to find the right voice for our character. We worked on the first volume all during the summer and fall, and the resulting book is quite promising. It’s the story of an American metal singer living in London whose day goes from bad to worse as he gets kicked out of his band, then makes his way to his favorite pub to lick his wounds—only to end up getting shot in the head during an apparent robbery. And after that, things start to go really badly for him.

Peter finished the first draft in November, and I’ve been spending my December doing a second draft. After that, I’ll kick it back to him for a third draft so that we can make sure our different voices are smoothed out. We’ll see where it goes from there! In any case, though, Death Without Pizza will not be the final title for the story. We’ll pick something a little less silly; I’m a little worried people will expect something over-the-top metal like Brütal Legend—which was great, but not the direction this story ended up going. Anyway, I’ll post updates as we go along!

Status: Being revised. After that, we’ll look for a publisher.

Updates on Secondary Projects

The Original
I’m moving this novella (which I don’t think I’ve mentioned before in a State of the Sanderson) into the Secondary Projects section. A while ago I had an idea for a story about a world where, if you committed a crime and went on the run for it, the government could create a clone of you (with your memories and personality) to hunt you down. After all, who better to hunt a criminal than a copy of that criminal? The copy would have strict controls in place so they could be killed by the government with the press of a button, but would be given the promise that they could take their Original’s place if they succeeded in hunting them down and killing them.

Earlier this year, the idea developed into a full-fledged outline, which I wrote out during time when I needed a break from other things. It worked out well, and so you might see progress on this in future years. Right now, I like the idea of doing it as an audio original, perhaps with a coauthor who is more experienced in audio or voice acting. So watch for updates here.

Status: Outlined.

The Apocalypse Guard
I do someday want to do something with this book. I’ve given it to Dan Wells, my long-time friend and sometimes partner in crime. He’s come back with some suggestions on how I could fix it, along with some brainstorming on where it could go as a series.

I’m going to give you fair warning, though. Every time Dan and I brainstorm together, weird things happen. Legion was the result of one of those sessions, as was Dan’s book I Am Not a Serial Killer. (Which you should all go read, if you haven’t.) The two of us are odd enough on our own, but together we’re downright strange. (You should see the two of us in role-playing sessions, where we constantly try to out-bizarre one another with our character concepts.)

I fully expect something to come out of The Apocalypse Guard sessions I’m doing with Dan, but…well, don’t expect it to be normal by any stretch of the word.

Status: In revisions, getting weirder.

Alcatraz
I’ve been tweaking Alcatraz Six. I did a partial draft a few years ago that went off the rails, and this year, I trimmed that back with some help from a friend into the parts that worked. From there, we’ve been trying to figure out how to get Bastille’s character voice right. It’s moving. Slowly, but it’s moving. Book Six, written from Bastille’s viewpoint, will be the end of the series.

Now that Legion is done, the next series I want to make sure gets tied up is Alcatraz. It shouldn’t be too much longer.

Status: Book Six made some small progress this year.

White Sand
Graphic Novel Two came out this year, and was very well received. (Save for the forced artist change, something I hated to have to do. That said, the new artist is doing a fantastic job.) Graphic Novel Three is the end of this sequence, and is well on its way to being completed.

The prose version is still available if you sign up for my mailing list. Though remember, we’ve made numerous updates to the story during the adaptation process.

I have no immediate plans to do sequels to this in graphic novel form, though you can expect stories set on Taldain to happen in the future.

Status: Final graphic novel is well under way. Release in 2019 or early 2020 likely.

Dark One
My outline for this drew a lot of buzz around both Hollywood and New York. The story, if you aren’t familiar with it, is about a young man in our world who discovers that a fantasy world has declared him to be the Dark One, and starts sending hit squads into our world to assassinate him. Pitched as “Harry Potter from Voldemort’s viewpoint,” the story follows this young man as he is forced to confront the possibility that he might do what the prophecies say.

We have a graphic novel in the works, and I’ve been doing pitches in Hollywood for a potential television show. So movement is certainly happening here.

Status: Going well. Might have art to show soon from the graphic novel.

Elantris, Warbreaker, Rithmatist
No updates from last year, I’m afraid. There was no intention to make progress on these this year. Once Alcatraz is wrapped up, I’ll turn my attention back to The Rithmatist as the last looming series that needs a wrap-up that hasn’t gotten one. Elantris and Warbreaker sequels aren’t to be expected until Stormlight Five and Wax and Wayne Four are done.

Status: Keep waiting. (Sorry again.)

Updates on Minor Projects

The Reckoners, Legion
These are both finished, and I don’t foresee any future updates anytime soon. Do note, however, that the Reckoners board game has been shipping, and it turned out great. You should soon have a chance to buy copies if you missed the Kickstarter, and I suspect there will be expansions in the future.

Status: Completed

Adamant
No change from last year. This space opera series of novellas is in limbo until I find the right time to work on them. It will happen eventually.

Status: No movement.

Soulburner
No motion on this space opera that I might rename Starburner once I get around to doing something with it. I have a cool worldbuilding document, but no novel specifically. I’ve been tempted to see if it would work for a video game setting.

Potential Cosmere Stories
Keep the following on your radar, as they may happen someday. However, as I’ll be knee-deep in Stormlight in 2019, don’t expect anything to happen on any of them until it is done. The list includes: Dragonsteel/Liar of Partinel, Sixth of the Dusk sequel, Silverlight novella, Threnody novel, Aether of Night, Silence Divine.

Movie/Television Updates

So, let’s talk about movies.

People tend to get really excited about news of my books being adapted—and rightly so. I’d be very excited to someday see one of my properties turn into a film, and I think it’s inevitable that some day, we’ll see it happen. However, the process of a book becoming a film or television show is a long one, involving the input of a lot of people. And fans tend to get very excited when something is being developed, but often don’t realize that the stages of development can often take a long time.

I thought it might be helpful here to go over what some of those steps are, so you can get a better idea of how far along my various properties are. Understand that this is a rough guide, and individual properties might follow a different route. This is also kind of an outsider’s take on it all, as I don’t consider myself an expert in Hollywood. Those who know more about the ins and outs of the business would probably consider this a gross over-simplification.

Step One: Producers Option a Story
In Hollywood terms an “option” is kind of like a rental agreement. The most common way a story starts on its path to an adaptation is with an option. (Sometimes, there’s even a step before this called a Shopping Agreement.) Basically, someone (usually a producer, but sometimes a studio) comes in and offers to pay an author every year to “option” their work, meaning the producer/studio gets exclusive rights to make a film on that work. They don’t buy the rights completely, however. Usually, they set a buyout price, then pay 5/10% of that price every year or so to keep the option locked up. This gives them time to put all the other pieces together for a film without needing to commit to paying the full buyout price until they’re certain the film is going to happen.

My agent once told me that about 1 out of 30 of the properties he saw get optioned eventually got made into a film or show. An option is absolutely an important step, but a lot of times fans see an option agreement in place and start expecting a film any day—when really, this is just the first exploratory step in the process. Sometimes, producers even option rights they never intend on making into films. (I once had a producer brag to me that he—in order to make sure nobody in town was trying to sell something similar to his property—had bought up all rights to similar books for cheap, with the intention of sitting on them for five years to make sure he didn’t have any competition. I was not impressed, to say the least.)

Step Two: Screenplay
Usually, after the option agreement is signed, a screenplay is commissioned for a film. For a television show, it will either be a screenplay for a pilot, or some kind of series bible or “treatment,” a kind of outline that talks about the process the group would use in adapting the property.

This screenplay, treatment, or bible is what the producers will take around town to try to get studios, directors, and actors interested in a property. A book being successful is interesting to Hollywood, but what they rightly want to see is if that book can be made into a workable screenplay. Often, this process takes years, as a screenplay/teleplay will be commissioned—then go through several rewrites. Sometimes, the producers will decide to hire a second or even third screenwriter to do a pass on the script, if they decide it needs another take or specific revisions.

Step Three: Studio Interest
With screenplay in hand, the producers will approach the studios or larger production companies. (Or sometimes content distributors, like Netflix.) The goal here is to get interest from parties with deep pockets and the power to actually make a film. This step can occasionally be skipped if a studio was involved from the beginning. (This has happened with several of my properties.) Sometimes, the studio might be interested—but send the producers back to step three to do more revisions before offering any kind of official deal or promise of distribution. Sometimes, the producers will need to secure promises from multiple parties—like, for instance, they might get a smaller studio in the US interested, then have to get a foreign partner interested to provide funding for overseas distribution promises.

Step Four: Attaching Talent
With a screenplay in hand and the backing of a studio or similar group, the producers can now try to get a director or actor on board with the film. This crucial step will have a big influence on how/if the film will get made. Obviously, if you get a major director interested, that makes the studios sit up and take notice. Likewise if a major actor attaches to the project. For television, this often involves getting an established show runner attached. (In my experience, with television, sometimes this sort of thing happens in Step Two instead—with the showrunner being involved in the pitch documents. In that case, Step Three is the big one: getting someone big in the business to fund a pilot.)

Step Five: Actual Green Light
Finally, if all the pieces come together, you get what is called a green light. The film is scheduled for shooting, the studio commits a large chunk of money to the project, and people start getting hired. This is when the option actually gets exercised, and the author gets the payment for the contract they likely signed years and years ago. Once in a while, a group of producers will decide that the property they hold is big enough that (once their option period runs out) they decide to pay the buyout price to get more time to try to get the film made. Sometimes, instead, they’ll just agree with the author to extend the option period for another payment.

Step Six: Film Gets Made
I’ve never gotten here, but I hear it’s a lovely experience.

So, with that in mind, I can tell you where each of my properties are. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to name a lot of names. For instance, if a director is interested but hasn’t signed on officially, it’s not my place to announce them as being involved. Likewise, if some producers have offered to option something, but we don’t have signed paperwork, it’s generally best if I stay quiet about the details so that they can do publicity on the deal in the way they would like.

Anyway, here’s where we stand for each of my properties.

Snapshot
It might be odd to see this one at the top of the list, but I think right now the best chance we have at a film would be one based on my story Snapshot. MGM announced their option of the rights almost two years ago, which is great—because it meant that we already had studio backing, cutting out one of the steps in the process. The producers were impressive in their enthusiasm, and they jumped right into commissioning a screenplay with a very talented writer.

I’ve read the screenplay, and consider it the best I’ve ever read based on one of my books. It helps that Snapshot itself is a shorter work, more easily adapted to a film. The Snapshot screenplay is an improvement on my story in virtually every way, something that I discovered with both joy and a little bit of shame. (Really, the screenwriter did some things with the story I probably should have figured out myself.)

With this great screenplay, I hope there will be a lot more good news to share really soon.

The Cosmere
DMG Entertainment optioned the rights to the Cosmere, and they have been wonderful to work with. They commissioned screenplays for The Emperor’s Soul, Mistborn, and The Way of Kings. They’re currently in Step Three above, trying to get studio interest for the properties. Mostly, they’ve been pitching Mistborn as a film series and The Way of Kings as a television series.

Likely, the success of things like the new Lord of the Rings show and the Kingkiller Chronicle will influence how this goes in the future.

Steelheart
The Reckoners series was optioned some years ago now by 21 Laps, Shawn Levy’s company, using backing from Fox. We were happy when they renewed their option this past summer, as we weren’t certain what the status of this would be in light of the Fox–Disney merger. It seems they’re planning to take the Reckoners with them through the process, which is good news.

This was an exciting deal, as Mr. Levy has done some great work—including the film Real Steel, which was an excellent adaptation of the original story. (And, of course, he was heavily involved with Stranger Things on Netflix.) Beyond that, it came with the implicit promise of support from Fox, meaning that we could skip the “finding a studio” step. That said, this is still in the screenplay stage.

Stephen Leeds/Legion
The Stephen Leeds stories have recently been optioned for a television series by a new production company. This is the property’s third time being picked up for an option, so I’m hopeful we’ll make it work this time. I don’t believe the company has been announced officially yet, so we’ll hold off on mentioning them for now. But we’re probably in the middle of Step Two for this one.

Dark One
Dark One, based on an outline and worldbuilding guide from me, is being shopped (in a Step Three kind of way) by FremantleMedia and Random House Studios, with an impressive showrunner attached. There has been movement since that announcement in June, but I can’t say anything publicly yet.

Bonus Mention: The Wheel of Time
As The Wheel of Time does not belong to me, I like to be careful about what I do and say with it. I don’t want to overstep my bounds. But for those who haven’t been paying attention, this series has progressed into a full-blown green light at Amazon Studios—with actual episodes being written and filming soon starting.

I don’t know what role, if any, I’ll have in this. Like I said, I like to be respectful of Team Jordan. It’s not my place to try to muscle in and pretend I’m in charge. At the same time, I do think I could offer something to the production, and the showrunner (who is quite sharp) has reached out to me multiple times for conversations about the adaptation. I’m impressed with everything I see, and hope to at the very least be able to pop over to the set when filming happens and grab some photos for you all.

For most of my own properties, I’d say to not hold your breath. I think they’ll happen eventually, but you shouldn’t start to get hyped up until Step Five happens for something. Well, we’re past Step Five with the Wheel of Time, and you can officially begin to feel hyped. It’s actually happening, and it looks great so far.

Games and Other Licensed Work
I’m interested in doing some more video game work. Ever since I got to be part of the Infinity Blade games, I’ve had the itch to do this again. Right now though, there is nothing in the works that I can announce—I’ve had some short preliminary conversations with game studios, but no contracts. I’ll continue to look at doing this, and will announce what I can, when I think something might actually be happening.

Unfortunately, Mistborn: Birthright never came together. (Though I’m on very good terms with the folks there.) And you can ignore any rumors about CD Projekt Red. Some fans got hyped when I said I liked them as a studio—and some news sites even picked it up as a story, for some reason. But that was just me mentioning in a random post that I think they do good work. I’ve never met with them—or talked to them—and have no reason to believe they even know who I am.

Video games aside, we do have some exciting and fun licensed properties that we’ve been working on, and I figured I should have a section in the State of the Sanderson for updates on these.

Board Games
We’ll keep looking at doing more board games. The Reckoners game, from Nauvoo Games, and Mistborn: House War, from Crafty Games—who also developed the Mistborn Adventure RPG—all of which turned out very well, and (equally important) were shipped in a reasonable timeframe to the backers on Kickstarter. We had a Stormlight game in the works, but have backed up a few steps on that one for various reasons. I hope to have one of those finished at some point. You may have seen my announcement from a few months ago, but we’ve partnered with Brotherwise Games to bring you the Call to Adventure: Stormlight expansion that should be out fall of 2019. I would also be interested in doing a deckbuilding card game based on my works eventually. (After all, you know how addicted I am to Magic: The Gathering.)

Jewelry
Badali Jewelry continues to do an excellent job creating a variety of awesome artwork pieces based on my various books. They approached me to do this way back when I was basically a nobody, and have been with me all this time, creating beautiful and detailed works.

Coins
Shire Post, creator of many fantasy-themed coins for various different properties, did a very successful Kickstarter for Mistborn coinage, and I’m quite pleased with both their professionalism and artistry. We here at Dragonsteel did the designs so that they’d be 100% in continuity with the books. We’re looking at doing more with Shire Post in the future.

Music
Black Piper’s Kaladin album has been shipping its physical rewards for backers, and are finishing up the last steps of their Kickstarter. I’m very pleased with the music, which you can find on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon MP3, and many other digital outlets. I think they did a great job, and suggest that it would make a great accompaniment to your next Stormlight reread. Due to the complexities of fitting in the album around the windows for some of our other licenses, if you’re interested in owning this we’d encourage looking at it before year-end.

Amazon
We’ve recently partnered with Amazon to help bring you more apparel options. As of now, it’s the only place other than my website store to sell officially licensed clothing. And in the not-to-distant future we’re going to expand our selection to include hoodies and other things as time allows.

Projected Schedule of Releases

Starsight (Skyward Two): November 2019
White Sand Three: Sometime 2019–2020
Stormlight Four: Fall 2020
Skyward Three: 2021
Wax and Wayne Four: Sometime 2020 or 2021

Conclusion and TL;DR

Whew. That’s quite the list, eh? This post gets longer and longer each year. The short version is actually very simple. I’m dedicating most of my efforts to Stormlight Four next year, with occasional short deviations to work on Skyward or Mistborn.

Once again, thank you all for joining me on this journey.

Brandon Sanderson
December 2018

Adam here. In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Handling a Large Cast, Brandon, Mary, Amal, and Maurice discuss their favorite techniques for managing large casts of characters, and how their processes differ from when writing small casts. What does “large” and “Small” mean?

Last week, we looked at foolish oaths, broken oaths, and the necessity of oaths to the fabric of society. This week, in chapters five and six, we’ll walk the last few miles with our favorite (only?) Windrunner and his lovely spren while they journey to Hearthstone to protect his family from the Everstorm.

Brandon recently had a signing for his newly released White Sand Vol. 2 graphic novel at Dragons Keep in Orem, Utah. He was able to sign and number some extra copies for them. If you’re wanting signed/numbered copies for your collection, that is the only place to get numbered copies–and they ship! Give them a call at 801.225.7623.

With just under three days to go on Nauvoo Games Kickstarter for the cooperative board game based on The Reckoners has reached well beyond their goal. If you haven’t had a chance to give it a look, you can check out their Kickstarter page, or give this post from a few months ago a look and check out the trailer and gameplay overview.

There are a few sales going on this week for some of Brandon’s books. If you’ve been wanting a hardcover edition of Oathbringer but haven’t purchased one yet, Barnes & Noble currently has them for 37% off list price. If audiobooks are more your style, you can get The Rithmatist and Firefight are being featured in Audible‘s “Listens you Love Sale” for only $6.95 each.

The Twitter Archives for February and March are up to date.

This week’s featured cosplay is Vin (actual size) from Emerald City Comic Con.

As most of you already know, my graphic novel White Sand Vol. 2 was released a few weeks ago. I will be doing a signing at the Dragons Keep in Orem, at 2 p.m. tomorrow. So if you’ve been wanting to get your hands on a signed copy of White Sand Vol. 2, feel free to stop by, or give the store a call for shipping options (801.225.7623).

I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it that’s okay. The greatest compliment you can give me is to read my books.

Be sure to check out my events page for other upcoming events.

Dragonsteel art director Isaac here. For the last year, we’ve been working close with Dynamite to bring you Volume 2 of the White Sand graphic novel, and today it finally releases. Let me introduce this next volume in the series with a bit of a history lesson.

White Sand has an interesting background. Many of you know that it was the sixth novel Brandon wrote–Elantris–that was picked up by Tor and published as his first novel, but by the time Tor released Elantris in 2005, Brandon had written more than thirteen novels. Mistborn, which came out a year later in 2006, was Brandon’s fourteenth.

But White Sand was Brandon’s first novel. His third novel–Lord Mastrell–was a sequel to it. When Brandon wrote his eighth novel, right after the infamous Dragonsteel, he went back to White Sand Prime and Lord Mastrell and rewrote them both from the beginning, combining them into the White Sand we now give away for those who sign up for the mailing list. I believe this was also the novel that got his agent Joshua’s attention, and while Joshua didn’t offer representation just yet, he did offer some suggestions for a revision. Brandon also had a list of things he wanted to accomplish were he ever to have the chance to return to White Sand and revise it. But when Elantris came out, turning around and revising an old novel was just not in the cards.

When Dynamite proposed a three-part graphic novel several years ago, Brandon met with Team Dragonsteel and laid out his vision for White Sand. We pulled out his revision notes along with Joshua’s commentary from so long ago. We re-read White Sand and made our own notes, and together as a team we fleshed out what Brandon would have liked to have done were he to revise White Sand today without the luxury of rewriting the book from the beginning. We clarified character motivations, we strengthened character arcs, we changed the gender of one of the main characters, and we brought in stronger elements from the Cosmere at large. Together, under Brandon’s direction, and with Dynamite’s help, we crafted this into the canonical version of White Sand.

Dynamite has worked hard under tight deadlines to bring us a high-quality adaptation from writer Rik Hoskin and high-quality illustrations from artist Julius Gopez. Peter, Karen, and I have poured over the text and illustrations and have done our best to keep the details true to the spirit of the original novel and keep it consistent within the canon of the Cosmere. We hope you enjoy this next foray into the world of White Sand.

Hey, all. It’s awards nomination season again!

As is tradition, I’d like to do a quick post highlighting what I have that is eligible for the various awards in sf/f. As always, I request that you nominate based on work, not author. If you are eligible to nominate, and truly think one of the works below is among the best you read this year, I’d love to have your vote.

Nominations for the Hugo Awards are now open. In order to nominate you need to have already been a Worldcon member (Helsinki, San Jose, or Dublin) as of December 31st, but members who join this year’s convention anytime may vote on the final ballot once it’s available.

Here’s what I have eligible in what category:

Best Novella:
Snapshot

Best Novel:
Oathbringer

Best Related Work:
Writing Excuses Season 12

Best Series:
The Stormlight Archive

As usual, I tend to highlight one of my releases. This year, to no surprise, I’d like to focus on Oathbringer and the Stormlight Archive. I feel that the Stormlight Archive has a good shot at a Best Series Hugo—it is my best work, and the previous volume missed a nomination by a fairly small margin of votes. I feel the series does interesting things with worldbuilding and narrative that Hugo voters would consider valuable to the fantasy genre as a whole.

If you’re eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, but haven’t read any of the Stormlight Archive, I’d be happy to provide a review copy of the first book to you for your consideration. The Hugo Awards nomination deadline is March 16th.

Other awards this year of interest, with who can nominate (and any notes on categories for the above works), are below. As always, the best reward for a novelist is the fact that people are reading the novels—and I don’t stress awards season very much. But I do like what these awards do for the community, and find it important to support them and fandom in general as it works to highlight our genres and the best they can provide.

• Nebula Award
  • Members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America can nominate by February 15th.
• World Fantasy Awards
  • Members of the World Fantasy conventions can send eligible works to the panel of judges before June 1st.
• David Gemmell Legend Award
  • Nominations are now closed. Voting on the long list of nominees opens to the public on February 16th, with final public voting beginning on April 20th.
  • The Legend Award is for novels. The Ravenheart Award is for novel cover illustrations.
• Dragon Awards
  • Nominations are open to the public now through June 20th, with final public voting beginning on August 1st.
  • Oathbringer is eligible for Best Fantasy Novel. (I recommend nominations go there rather than in Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel; you can’t nominate it in two categories.)
  • White Sand Volume 1 is eligible for Best Graphic Novel.

Introduction

Welcome and happy Koloss Head Munching Day! It is time for my yearly update on projects! Strap in for a long post. (If you want to compare, here is a link to last year’s post.)

It has been a busy month for us, here at Dragonsteel Headquarters. The leatherbound edition of Mistborn 2, which was supposed to get here in November, was delivered the day I flew home from the UK, ending my tour. (And the Mistborn 1 second printing came the next day.) So I’ve been doing a lot of sitting and listening to podcasts while I sign stacks and stacks of books. (If you’re curious, I’ve been listening to Hardcore History.)

• My Year
• Main Projects Updates
• Secondary Projects Updates
• Minor Projects Updates
• Potential Projects Updates
• Movie/Television Updates
• Updates Conclusion
• Projected Schedule
• Conclusion

My Year

January–June: Oathbringer Revisions
I spent most of this year doing revisions for Oathbringer. I did several exhaustive drafts during the January–June months, and did the final handoff to Peter (for copyediting and proofreading) right at the end of June.

June–Mid September: The Apocalypse Guard
Then, for the first time in what felt like forever (it was really only about sixteen months), I got a chance to work on something that wasn’t Oathbringer or Edgedancer. I launched right into The Apocalypse Guard, the follow-up to The Reckoners…and it didn’t work. I spent July, August, and part of September writing that. (I finished the last chapter sometime in early September, and turned in the second draft a few weeks later.)

September–October: Legion 3
I was already feeling a little discouraged by that book not quite coming together, though at that point I assumed I’d be able to fix it in revisions. (Well, I still think I can do that–I just think it will take more time.) Mid-September, I launched into Legion Three: Lies of the Beholder. That took around a month to finish, bringing us to mid-October. By then, I knew something was seriously wrong with The Apocalypse Guard, as my revision attempts were fruitless. So, I called Random House and pulled the book–then launched into Skyward.

October–November: Skyward
I have been writing on that book ever since, and you can read the blog post yesterday about that.

November–December: Oathbringer Tour
The tour was wonderful–somehow both exhausting and energizing at the same time. Here are some of the fan costumes that showed up this year. Thank you all for coming out to see me!

December so far: Skyward
Unfortunately, and I know you guys know to watch for them, there are no hidden or secret novellas or books for this year. I have been running around feeling behind all year, first on Oathbringer, and then trying to find a replacement for The Apocalypse Guard.

Updates on Main Projects

Stormlight

It’s time to take a little breather. I’ve begun working on the outline for book four, which is kind of a mess right now because of things I’ve been moving around between books as I write. My goal this year for Stormlight will be to have rock-solid outlines for books four and five done by December 2018.

My current projection is that I’ll spend half of my time writing Stormlight, and half of it doing other things. (I spoke last year about just how big an undertaking a Stormlight book is–and why I can’t write them back to back.) I realize that many of you would prefer to have only Stormlight, but that would drive me insane–and drive the series into the ground.

I think this is a realistic schedule. So, I’m giving myself 2018 to work on Skyward (hopefully a trilogy) and other projects. Then on January 1st, 2019, I go back to Stormlight refreshed and excited to be back in Roshar, and I write on book four until it’s done. (With a 2020 or 2021 release, depending on how the writing goes.) I do hope to find time for a novella, like Edgedancer, that we can put out between books. This one is tentatively called Wandersail.

For those who don’t know, the Stormlight Archive is a ten-book series composed of two five-book arcs.

Status: Writing outline for book four.

Mistborn

Wax and Wayne 4 is on the slate next after I finish Skyward. (Though if it’s going well, I may do the entire trilogy for Skyward first.) I need four or five months at least to do Wax and Wayne, so rain or shine, my plan is to get into this on September 1st at the latest. Hopefully a little earlier.

This will wrap up the second era of Mistborn books. (And yes, I’ve settled—at long last—on just calling it that. All the other terms I tried were just too confusing.) Once the Wax and Wayne books are done, I’ll look to do something else for a little while before coming back for Era Three. (1980s spy thriller Mistborn.)

Status: To be written in 2018.

Skyward

Current main project. Yesterday’s blog post talks about it in depth–but so far, so good!

Status: To be written in 2018.

Updates on Secondary Projects

Legion

The third Stephen Leeds/Legion story (which is roughly the same length as the second one) is finished! Titled Lies of the Beholder, this is the story that delves into Stephen’s backstory, his interactions with Sandra, and the nature of his aspects. Good stuff! It’s done, and it’s weird. But good weird.

Right now, the goal is to collect all three Legion stories and release them in hardcover sometime around September 2018. That means there probably won’t be a standalone release of Lies of the Beholder until a year or so later, like we plan with Edgedancer. However, for those who like cohesion on their bookshelves, I’ve mandated that Subterranean Press be allowed to do a leatherbound like they did with the first two. So you can have books that match. This should happen right around the release of the collection.

In the UK, there should be a small-format version of the story on its own rather than a collection. (Again, for matching purposes. In the US, the small-format hardcovers have been published by my own company, Dragonsteel, as we waited for enough stories to do a collection.) We should eventually do a small-format Dragonsteel edition for people who really want one of those to match, but I’d suggest that the best way to support the stories is to buy the collection. And if you haven’t ever tried them out, you’ll be able to get them all at once!

This marks the end of the Stephen Leeds stories, though we’re in talks for another television deal—so maybe that will happen.

Status: Series finished! Publication in late 2018.

Alcatraz

Contrary to last year’s State of the Sanderson (where I didn’t expect movement on this series this year) there have been developments. I have tried working on the sixth and final book (which will be from Bastille’s viewpoint) and have found that I didn’t like the test chapters I did.

The story went the wrong direction, and beyond that, I didn’t feel like I had Bastille’s voice down. In some attempts, the book just sounded too much like the previous ones—but when I exaggerated her voice, she felt a bit Flanderized. I’ve been toying with how to make it work, and I’ve come up with a somewhat outside-the-box solution. My long-standing friend and former student, Janci Patterson, is also a big fan of the series. She’s been offering feedback since I wrote the first book back in…2006, was it? I’ve gone to her and asked if she’d be willing to collaborate on it.

The goal is that by bringing in another author to write it with me, I’ll be able to get the book to work—to have it feel different enough from the others, yet still be in the same theme and spirit. The goal is to do an outline in early February once I have book one of Skyward done, then hand that off to Janci and let her toy with it a while before sending it back to me.

So you can watch for that, and I’ll post updates.

Status: Outline to be written in 2018.

Elantris and Warbreaker

No change on either one from last year. The plan has always been to look back at Sel and Nalthis once the Wax and Wayne books are done. That’s still my intention.

Status: Keep waiting. (Sorry.)

White Sand

Graphic Novel 1 was a huge success, and Graphic Novel 2 is finished and off to the printers. Expected publication date is February 2018. It will be the second of three.

The prose version is still available to be read. If you sign up for my mailing list, we auto-send you a link to it.

Status: Graphic novel 2 coming in early 2018.

The Rithmatist

This continues to be the single most-requested sequel among people who email me or contact me on social media. It is something I want to do, and still intend to, but it has a couple of weird aspects to it—completely unrelated to its popularity—that continue to work as roadblocks.

The first problem is that it’s an odd relic in my writing career. I wrote it as a diversion from a book that wasn’t working (Liar of Partinel, my second attempt at doing a novel on Yolen, after the unpublished novel Dragonsteel). It went really well—but it also was something I had to set aside when the Wheel of Time came along.

I eventually published it years later, but my life and my writing has moved in a very different direction from the point when I wrote this. These days, I try very hard to make stories like this work as novellas or standalone stories, rather than promising sequels. I feel I did promise a sequel for this one, and I have grand plans for it, but the time just never seems to be right.

The other issue is that writing about that era in America—even in an alternate universe—involves touching on some very sensitive topics. Ones that, despite my best efforts, I feel that I didn’t handle as sensitively as I could have. I do want to come back to the world and do a good job of it, but doing an Aztec viewpoint character—as I’d like to do as one of the viewpoints in book two—in an alternate Earth…well, it’s a challenge that takes a lot of investment in research time.

And for one reason or another, I keep ending up in crisis mode—first with Stormlight 3 taking longer than I wanted, and now with The Apocalypse Guard not turning out like I wanted. So someday I will get to this, but it’s going to require some alignment of several factors.

Status: Not yet. We’ll see.

Updates on Minor Projects

The Reckoners

The Apocalypse Guard was in this universe, and we’ll see what happens there, but for now I’m leaving this series alone. There might be a Mizzy book that I end up doing, but no promises.

Status: Trilogy complete. Series done, for now.

Adamant

This space opera novella series is in same place it was last year, I’m afraid. (One novella done, no more written on the rest.) I took a little time to work on the outline, but didn’t find a chance to write the second novella. It will be awesome when I do it, and I got really close to moving this to the front burner several times, but it didn’t end up working.

Status: Still possible in the near future.

Dark One

My eternal “like Harry Potter from Voldemort’s viewpoint” fantasy sequence is still hanging out, buzzing at the sides of my brain. I wrote a really spectacular outline for it this summer, one I love quite a bit, and it got both television graphic novel interest—but these are deals still very much in the works, so I can’t talk about them yet.

I’m pleased with what I have though, and feel this series has moved for the first time in a long while. Note that I did end up pulling it out of the Cosmere, as it ended up working better as a dark secondary world fantasy than it did as a Cosmere YA series. It went both older, and more twisted, in the current outline. Hopefully, by next year’s State of the Sanderson we’ll have something more solid to announce.

Status: Exciting developments in the works!

Death by Pizza

Pizza delivery man becomes a necromancer. On my perpetual list of things to do—but no movement.

Status: No movement.

Soulburner

Random space opera thing I worked on for a while.

Status: No movement.

Potential Cosmere Stories List

Here are things that at one point I’ve had in the works, and probably someday plan to do, in the Cosmere:

• Dragonsteel/Liar of Partinel. (Hoid’s origin story, to be written sometime after Stormlight is done.)
• Sixth of the Dusk sequel. (I had a pretty cool idea for this last year. Nothing more than that.)
• Untitled Silverlight novella. (What it says on the tin.)
• Threnody novel. (An expedition back to confront the Evil that destroyed the old world.)
• Aether of Night. (Still in the Cosmere, and you can see the odd remnant of an Aether popping up here and there. Bound to be drastically different from the unpublished novel, which I allow the 17th Shard to give out to people who request it on their forums. Basically, the only thing from it that is canon is the magic system.)
• Silence Divine. (Disease magic novella set on Ashyn.)

Movie/Television Updates

Mistborn and Stormlight Films

These rights are held by DMG Entertainment, and they’ve been very good at working with me and showing me things. They have scripts for both Mistborn and The Way of Kings, which they are actively trying to make happen in Hollywood.

One way they’re approaching this is to do a Stormlight VR experience, which we’ve talked about before. This is less about making a video game, and more about making something to show off to studios to kind of immerse them in the setting of the books. As I determined early on, this is an interesting but weird world, and having visuals (like the art in the books themselves) helps a lot with bringing people around to understanding.

They do plan to release the VR experience to fans on Steam, for those with VR headsets. It’s not intended to be a full game, as I said, more a demo of the Shattered Plains—you’ll get to personally experience the Shattered Plains from the novels and interact with the characters and creatures that inhabit them. We’ll do some posts on it in coming months as it gears up to be released, and I’ve invited the developers to do some guest posts on my blog.

Regardless of what happens on the film and television front here, at the very least you have that to look forward to!

The Reckoners

Still held by Fox, with 21 Laps producing. They renewed their option this summer, so they are still interested in the property, though I haven’t had any specific updates in a while. I have no idea how the Disney acquisition might affect things.

Snapshot

If you missed my weird, cyberpunkish detective story, you can now get a copy of it in our Dragonsteel Edition bundled with another of my stories. The ebook is still around too. MGM snatched this up almost before it was published—it was very hot in Hollywood in the months leading up to publication.

The screenwriter they attached to it had another project delaying him for the bulk of this year, but they’ve said he’ll turn his full attention to it staring sometime just after the holidays.

Other Properties

Legion and Dark One are currently in negotiations. The rest of the Cosmere is covered by the DMG deal, as we want one company working on that at a time. We have a small deal for Defending Elysium that has it under option with a screenwriter, and the first draft screenplay is good. That leaves Alcatraz, The Rithmatist, and a couple of shorts (Dreamer, Perfect State, Firstborn) with no options right now.

Updates Conclusion

There we go—everything I’ve talked about should be on that list. I have a few other little stories bouncing around in my head that I haven’t talked about yet. (Well, probably there are hundreds, but only a few that are relatively close to seeing the light of day.) We’ll see what happens.

Projected Schedule

My projected publication schedule looking forward swaps The Apocalypse Guard out for Skyward and moves the Legion collection into the place of Wax and Wayne 4, reflecting what I actually wrote this year. (Note, these are always very speculative. And Peter is probably already worried about Stormlight 4.)

September 2018: Stephen Leeds/Legion Collection
November 2018: Skyward
Fall 2019: Wax and Wayne 4
Sometime 2019: Skyward 2
Sometime 2020: Stormlight 4
Sometime 2020: Skyward 3

Conclusion: Birthday!

Last year, I tried out something where—in response to people asking me if they could send me birthday gifts—I suggested sending me a magic card from a specific set, with a signature and note on the back.

This was a little experiment that people had a lot of fun with, and this year I want to post the results! That means a lot of photos, as I wanted to show the notes people wrote on the cards. Many of you included touching letters to me as well, which I read and appreciate—though those tended to be a little more personal in nature, so I’m not going to post them.

Some of you will be completely uninterested in this, so we’ve collected the images in a gallery rather than posting them all here. Have fun browsing through them! And thank you so much to everyone. It was a lot of fun to see the little notes that you’d all sent in.

I’m forty-two today, which is an auspicious number in science fiction fandom. It’s going to be tough to top these last few months and the reception to Oathbringer.

The fact that I get to do this crazy thing for a living continues to be the best gift of them all.

Brandon Sanderson
December 2017

For those of you who have been paying attention to my various feeds on my social media channels this won’t come as a surprise, but for those of you who are just seeing this, Humble Bundle has put together a collection which includes many of my shorter works as well as the Graphic Audio edition of a few others. I will get to more on that shortly. Many of you may not know how Humble Bundle works and I don’t think I could say it any more succinctly than they have listed on their website.

Brandon Sanderson’s the man. So we’re bringing you a bundle of some of his highlights – and some lesser-known titles, too. Some are audiobooks and some are ebooks, but all are awesome.

Pay $1 or more. All together, the novellas, audiobooks, game guides, and graphic novel in this bundle would cost over $174. Here at Humble Bundle, though, you name your price of $1 or more and increase your contribution to upgrade your bundle!

Read them anywhere. The books are available in PDF, ePUB, and MOBI formats (instructions are here); the adventure game and supplements are available in PDF; the comic is available in PDF, ePub, and CBZ formats (instructions are here); and the audiobooks are available as MP3 and FLAC files (instructions are here).

Support charity. Choose where the money goes – between the publishers, The Moth Education Program (Storyville Center for the Spoken Word), and, if you like, a second charity of your choice via the PayPal Giving Fund. For details on how this works, click here. If you like what we do, you can leave us a Humble Tip too!

So, What’s Included?

Pay $1 or more

• Firstborn/Defending Elysium
• The Emperor’s Soul
• Legion
• Legion:Skin Deep
• Warbreaker Part 1 – Graphic Audio
• Elantris Part 1 – Graphic Audio
• Mistborn Adventure Game

Pay $8 or more to also unlock!

• Sixth of the Dusk
• Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell
• Perfect State
• Warbreaker Part 2 – Graphic Audio
• Elantris Part 2 – Graphic Audio
• Terris: Wrought of Copper Player’s Guide

Pay $15 or more to also unlock!

• Snapshot
• Dreamer
• The Hope of Elantris – Graphic Audio
• Warbreaker Part 3 – Graphic Audio
• Elantris Part 3 – Graphic Audio
• White Sand – Graphic Novel
• Alloy of Law: Mistborn Campaign

There are a few regional restrictions that we couldn’t work around, so a few items will vary from one region to another so use the link at the top to check the specifics for your locale.

Many of you have been asking for details about the release of White Sand. For those who don’t know, this is a book I wrote around the same time as Elantris—but which I didn’t ever sell. It needed a solid revision before I could send it out, and there were so many things I had to work on that the revision kept getting delayed. When the comic book company Dynamite Entertainment came along a few years ago asking if I had anything that would make a good graphic novel, it seemed the perfect opportunity to make use of White Sand.

Dynamite has been excellent to work with. Rik Hoskin, the person hired to do the adaptation, is a fantastic writer—and he really managed to preserve the core of my story, using my own dialogue and descriptions, while cutting out all the unnecessary stuff. The artist Julius Gopez, the colorist Ross Campbell, the letterer Marshall Dillon, and the editor, Rich Young, have all done a wonderful job.

The novel is big (no surprise), so it’s going to be released in three volumes. The first of these comes out today!

I’ll be doing two release events for volume 1 of White Sand. See below, or the upcoming events page on my website. All copies of White Sand will be signed and numbered at both of these events.

White Sand Release and Signings

Tuesday, June 28th

Time: 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Address: Barnes & Noble Jordan Landing
7157 Plaza Center Drive
West Jordan, UT 84084
Phone: (801) 282.1324

Wednesday, June 29th

Time: 5:00-8:00 p.m.
Address: Dragon’s Keep
48 West 300 North
Orem, UT 84606
Phone: (801) 225.7623