It has been quite a busy time these last six or seven months. Too busy, maybe? A lot of great experiences, but it has cut into my time to be at home writing. Let me give you a little update of what I’m doing writing-wise.

First off, of course, is Words of Radiance. If you weren’t watching, I finished the rough draft of this book (the second book of the Stormlight Archive, and sequel to The Way of Kings) late June. I sent it off to my agent and editor for commentary and advice. I got back my editor’s notes last week, my agent’s notes today, and Peter just finished assembling everything together and doing a tight, continuity-focused copyedit of the entire manuscript. At 360k words, it’s roughly the length of A Memory of Light.

Obviously, there’s a lot left to do here. Tor keeps talking about January as a publication month, and I’d like to meet that, if at all possible. That’s going to require me to do several drafts of the novel over the next two months. More updates as we progress, but I’m pleased with the book. It has only a few large flaws, and I think they can be fixed fairly quickly.

During July, I took time off from major projects to have a breather. If you aren’t aware, I prefer to do smaller projects between big epics as a means of helping me stay fresh. This month’s “breather” stories include a novelette (9k words) piece set in the Steelheart world, which should be published as an e-original around Christmastime. I also did some work in the Infinity Blade world. (More on that later. If you aren’t aware, this is a video game that friends of mine make. I’ve enjoyed being involved to practice my video-game writing chops, with an eye toward doing Mistborn video game writing.)

My next major writing project will be the sequel to Steelheart, which is called Firefight. (And if you haven’t seen the trailer, Prologue, or teaser chapters for Steelheart, please go give them a look! We’re hoping for big things from this novel.) As you might be aware, I will often be preparing for/writing one piece while I do revisions on another. I generally can only do new prose on one piece at a time, but I like to be revising and writing on two different things at once. So, for the foreseeable future, I’ll be writing Firefight and revising Words of Radiance.

What does this mean for future projects? Well, let me go down the list of sequels in order of current urgency.

1. Rithmatist Sequel. I will hop on writing the next one very soon.
2. Shadows of Self. (The next Wax and Wayne Mistborn novel.) I’ve finished some sample chapters of this and have a fairly solid outline. Expect to see me writing on this sometime early next year.
3. Book Three of Stormlight. I don’t want to let this series languish with three year gaps between books, as I was forced to do between books one and two. Because of this, I’ll try to be doing them at 18 month or 24 month intervals at the most. Do note that the books, at around a thousand pages each, are HUGE undertakings. The way I write, I have to space out projects like this. They’ll be regular, I promise, but part of the reason I’m so productive is because I allow myself freedom to work on different projects, instead of being beholden to one series.
4. Calamity (Book Three of Steelheart.) This will be the final of that trilogy.
5. Elantris Sequel. (This is getting close. Should be doing this in the relatively near future.)
6. Legion Sequel. I have sample chapters of this done, but as it’s a side project, it can’t command prime writing time. I will probably slip it in between some of the books above somewhere, but I can’t promise when.
7. Final Rithmatist book. (I’m not 100% sure this will be a trilogy. It might just be two books.)
8. Nightblood. (Warbreaker sequel.) This one is still fairly far off.
9. Alcatraz 5. Still planning to write this. We have to find a home for the series, however, as I bought the rights back to it from Scholastic earlier this year. Within the next couple of months, my US readers will be able to buy my British publisher’s omnibus edition of the first four books.

As for non-sequel, original projects, here’s what might be coming in the future, as they stand now.

1. “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell.” Cosmere novella set on a new world. Find it in GRRM and Gardner Dozois’s anthology called Dangerous Women, which I believe is coming out Christmastime. Read an excerpt on Tor.com.
2. “Sixth of the Dusk.” Cosmere novella set on a new world. Written following a Writing Excuses brainstorm. Still needs a revision, but should be released later this year.
3. The Silence Divine. Standalone Cosmere Novel. Modestly far off, but maybe not too far. I don’t want to be stuck writing only sequels. Though, since I did release two new books this year (Rithmatist and Steelheart) in new worlds, starting new series, I will probably wait on this one until those series are done.
4. The Liar of Partinel. Cosmere Novel, set on the original planet of Yolen and dealing with Hoid’s origin story. Very far off right now.
5. Skyward. (Working title.) Young Adult cosmere novel. In the early stages of development. Probably a few years off.
6. Dark One. Non-cosmere YA novel. Still haven’t been able to get this one off the ground. I had a chance, but The Rithmatist worked better, and I wrote that instead. Don’t hold your breath on this one, though someday I might post the sample chapters that I wrote a few years back.
7. Death By Pizza. (Urban Fantasy.) This book was fun, but not remotely good enough to publish. We’ll see if I ever get the bug to go back and fix it.
8. White Sand. Cosmere trilogy. Some fun things are happening here, but I can’t really talk about them right now.

And finally, media properties.

1. Mistborn: Birthright. (Video Game for consoles and maybe PC, cross platform.) We’re looking at 2015 for this right now. (Sorry.) The new console generation made us push it back. I’m still planning to write it, and development is still moving. It’s far from dead.
2. Mistborn film. Option runs out in January. I’ve had a very good experience with the producers, but so far, we do not have funding for the film. We’ll have to see where we are in another six months.
3. Legion television show. Lionsgate still has this under option!
4. Steelheart Film. I had lunch with the producer at Comic-Con. It’s still early in the process, but they’re very engaged and very excited.

That’s it for updates. For now, I should get back to work on the Firefight outline. As always, thank you all for reading!

For those who missed the news and are wondering about the A MEMORY OF LIGHT ebook, I talked about it at the bottom of my blog post last week.

Patrick Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders charity is auctioning off a signed first edition hardcover of THE GATHERING STORM. The auction includes dragon and sword pins from Badali Jewelry and a T-shirt of your choice from Ta’veren Tees that will be signed by the members of Team Jordan. Worldbuilders is a great charity and they also have lots of cool stuff you have a chance of getting by donating, so check out Pat’s blog posts about it.

On this week’s episode of the Writing Excuses podcast, Mary, Howard, Dan, and I discuss the Hero’s Journey. This is an episode that we’ve talked about doing for years and have finally gotten around to. Enjoy!

For Mistborn fans, World of Warcraft is adding a “Survivor’s Bag of Coins” to the 5.2.0 patch. See details here. I think this is awesome! (Also note that the Mistborn action RPG MISTBORN: BIRTHRIGHT is still in development, but right now it looks like the release might get pushed back to 2014 instead of this year. There hasn’t been an official announcement though.)

On my tour I’ve been stopping to sign books in airport bookstores as usual. Years ago some of my fans nicknamed this “Brandalizing.” Grammar Girl did a quick blog post about the term this week.

Here’s a video of Harriet reading the wind scene from A MEMORY OF LIGHT at our signing this past weekend at the College of Charleston. Thanks, Jessica Crout! The Addlestone Library there is the home of Robert Jordan’s papers. They had on display this very early draft of THE EYE OF THE WORLD with Jordan’s handwritten edits on it.

Last week I appeared on Wired’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast talking about AMoL. And USA Today had a cool Robert Jordan sidebar in the paper. Here’s a photo:

My assistant has also uploaded two more Twitter archive posts. [Assistant Peter’s note: The first one is spoiler free, but there are plenty of spoilers for A MEMORY OF LIGHT in the second one. Brandon tries to keep spoilers out of his Twitter feed, but there are major spoilers in several of the questions that Brandon answered.]

We’ll find out how A MEMORY OF LIGHT did on the New York Times bestseller list later today or tomorrow, but we already know it hit #1 on the Ingram and National Indie lists. (The USA Today listing above was for the week before the book came out.) We also made Shelf Awareness’s Image of the Day for January 16th, which you can see here (taken at Joseph-Beth in Lexington):

Thanks for all of your support, and I hope you’re enjoying the book! It has been an honor.

Somehow I missed announcing that Writing Excuses Season Six was nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Related Work category. The voting deadline is tomorrow (Tuesday the 31st), and you can vote if you are a supporting or attending member of this year’s World Science Fiction convention in Chicago. Other nominations from the Writing Excuses crew in the various categories are Mary Robinette Kowal’s novella “Kiss Me Twice” and Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary graphic story volume Force Multiplication.

Last week the Writing Excuses podcast had a microcasting episode touching on these topics:

• How do you deal with bad reviews?
• How do you apply Brandon’s magic system rules to science fiction?
• Dan, will you do the marshmallow voice for us again?
• How do you keep tension high without exhausting the reader?
• You’ve made your manuscript as good as you know how to. Now you need to make it even better, based on feedback. What do you do?
• Any tips on creating suspension of disbelief?
• How do you deal with annoying fans?

This week’s episode is another one of our “project in depth” episodes; this time we cover Dan Wells’s latest novel, The Hollow City. (Earlier we did the same thing with my novel The Way of Kings, Mary’s novel Glamour in Glass, and Howard’s graphic novel volume Force Multiplication.) Please note that all of these in-depth episodes necessarily contain SPOILERS, so it’s best if you read the work in question ahead of time!

The most recent ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS annotation covers the final chapter. Just one annotation left to go.

Inside Mac Games has an interview with me on the subject of the upcoming Mistborn: Birthright video game. I also did a phone interview for the Chattanooga Times Free Press a couple weeks ago while my assistant was driving me to the airport for my flight to LibertyCon (which was a blast, and it was great seeing so many of you!). The transcript of that interview is here.

My assistant also uploaded another Twitter posts archive. If you haven’t been paying attention to my Twitter or Facebook feeds, you may have missed the announcement that I’ve turned in the final draft of A MEMORY OF LIGHT to Harriet. Copyedits and the rest of the production process remain to be done after this. I’ll have more of my thoughts in a longer post sometime this week, maybe tomorrow.

Today we’re officially announcing Mistborn: Birthright, an action-RPG set in the Mistborn world.

To those who have been paying close attention, much of this may not be surprising. The MB:B website went live earlier in the month, and I have tweeted several times about the impending game. In short, we’re hoping to do a fun, fast-paced, action game with some RPG elements, cool Allomancy effects, and some (hopefully) killer dialogue. That last part is my job, as I’ll be writing the story and most (if not all) of the game’s dialogue.

The game will take place hundreds of years before the events of the books, during the early days of the Final Empire. People have often asked me if I will do prequels to Mistborn, and my response has frequently been that I won’t likely write them as novels–but I might consider them for other mediums. We’re going to try it here, and this will let us do some very cool things to expand the world. And yes, you get to play as a Mistborn.

The game is scheduled for fall of next year, and we’re still very much in the preliminary stages of game design. That means that I don’t have much to tell you other than what I wrote above. (Though the game’s website will be posting screenshots and the like as they become available.)

So, since I can’t tell you terribly much about the game quite yet, instead I’ll tell you how it came to be. I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the chance to do a Mistborn game for some time; several chances arose, but they always fell through for one reason or another. I didn’t want to give the rights to just anybody. I’ve been a gamer since my first Atari, and I wanted to do it right.

When Little Orbit first approached me, I was skeptical. I didn’t recognize the company, and though they had worked on some professional projects, I didn’t see anything in their pedigree that screamed Mistborn at me. However, I like to at least talk to people who are making offers on my work.

And so, I chatted with them. I met with them. And I was impressed. Not only did they have a love for Mistborn, they had more experience at this sort of thing than I’d originally assumed. The company is made up of people who have been in the business for a long time, and they had worked on a variety of games I really love. (They even have guys who were involved in the original Fallout and Baldur’s Gate games.)

Their pitch materials were good and very persuasive. But the final thing that convinced me they were right came when we sat down and talked about the type of game we would make. Not only were they eager for me to be involved in the story, our discussions of what would make an awesome Mistborn game were synergistic and exciting. They envisioned the game the same way I always had.

The longer I’ve worked with them, the more impressed I’ve been. They keep their promises; they aren’t just willing to let me be involved–they seem dedicated to making certain I’m pleased every step of the way. They don’t need to go so far–I’ve said before that I feel an author shouldn’t usually have control of game design, but leave that to people who know how to make fun games–but they have gone well beyond what is required of them.

These guys really, really want to make a great Mistborn game. I’m thrilled by what is coming your way when this thing is done.

There’s always another secret.

Brandon

The press release follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Best-selling Fantasy Writer Brandon Sanderson and Little Orbit team up to bring Mistborn Saga to Video games in 2013

Sanderson to pen original prequel to Mistborn Series for all-new RPG franchise

March 26, 2012 – Rancho Santa Margarita, CA – Little Orbit revealed today that they will be bringing bestselling author Brandon Sanderson’s epic fantasy series Mistborn to games late next year for PlayStation® computer entertainment system, the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, Windows PC and Mac.

Mistborn is set in a dark world of ash, mist, and gothic fantasy creatures, dominated by a seemingly immortal villain known as the Lord Ruler. It also follows individuals who use a powerful rule-based magic system known as Allomancy that allows them to temporarily enhance their physical and mental abilities by ingesting and “burning” flakes of metal. Those who have the ability to burn a single metal are called Mistings, and those who can burn all metals are known as Mistborn.

The upcoming RPG video game will feature an original storyline created by Sanderson, set several hundreds of years before the first Mistborn novel, and will focus on a unique combat system that puts Allomancy into the hands of gamers. Players will suit up as Fendin “Fiddle” Fathvell, an arrogant young nobleman who must quickly master his newfound Allomantic abilities before forces at work can destroy his entire family.

“I’m a huge fan of the series, and I cannot wait to get this into the hands of gamers,” said Matthew Scott, CEO of Little Orbit. “Between the distinctive magic system, the story twists Brandon has planned for the game, and the rich depth of character skills, we’re creating something very unique for players to enjoy.”

Sanderson is no stranger to video games. He recently completed story development on the Infinity Blade II video game including the accompanying Infinity Blade: Awakening novella. In between writing his popular Mistborn and Stormlight novels, he is also finishing work on the final novel in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Sanderson has been labeled “one of the most popular new fantasy writers to emerge in the last ten years.”

“As an avid gamer, I’m extremely excited by this opportunity,” said Sanderson. “The chance to write the story for a Mistborn game while working with a team of talented developers is, quite literally, living a dream.”

For more information visit www.mistborngame.com

And be sure to follow us on Facebook to receieve updates www.facebook.com/mistborngame

About Little Orbit

Little Orbit is a worldwide video game publisher formed in January 2010 with a focus on licensed-based entertainment products. The company’s emphasis is on working with popular creators to extend their vision into games through transmedia storytelling and engaging content for all gaming platforms. Little Orbit has a unique history assisting major entertainment companies to leverage their brands through emerging game channels to help grow and engage consumers. Founded by industry veterans and key development, sales and marketing personnel, Little Orbit is focused on three primary channels of distribution including traditional game retail, non-traditional retail channels, and digital download over the various platform networks.

www.littleorbit.com

About Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson is the coauthor with Robert Jordan of the #1 NY Times bestselling Wheel of Time novels The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight, and a top 10 NY Times and international bestselling author for his novels The Way of Kings and Mistborn: The Alloy of Law, all published by Tor Books in the US. An award-winning author, he is published in 25 languages, with global sales in the millions of copies. His Mistborn saga has become a multi-faceted brand, with a film in development from Paloppa Pictures, and a classic tabletop RPG released by Crafty Games in 2011.

www.brandonsanderson.com