Brandon Sanderson's Blog, page 7

Hey, everybody! So, Weekly Update time. 

First things first. There was a lot of snow, and we still haven’t seen our print copies of Secret Project 1. So we have made an executive decision. We’re going to start shipping out February’s box right now. As soon as we get copies of Secret Project 1, the print ones, we’re going to start sending those out. But you guys have been waiting long enough. So we are going to send out February’s box early. This might mean that some of you will get this box, in fact, probably a lot of you will get this box, before you get your print copies of the first book. But we figure you would like to get a box, and we would like to be sending it out. So this is for the people who did the Year of Sanderson so that you can still get something in January. So we’re going to start doing that. As soon as they come in, we will stop and start shipping those. But we’re tired of waiting on someone else.

What’s the delay? The delay is, I’m told, twofold. Number one, foiling the covers is just taking longer than they thought. We do—all the material is at the printers. They are printing them. They promised they would be sending shipments of books, but then they have not done so yet. This is not uncommon in the printing world. They are actually doing a very good job putting up with us. We asked them for 25,000 books and then we later said we needed 150,000 of each of the four. So we ordered 100,000 and then upped our order to 600,000 and they have found time for us. So we are very grateful for them. But it is taking a little bit longer, supply chain things and stuff like that.

But the box, the Hoid box, February’s box, is all done, packed, and ready to go. We’re going to start shipping that to you. So be aware of that. You’re getting your February box early. I’m sorry for all the rest of you who have to wait. But you should have gotten your eBook and your audiobook already. If you haven’t, please pick them up, or think about doing it. And maybe you’re waiting for the print copy because you love print copies. 

For everyone who wasn’t part of the Kickstarter, well, you should watch the channel this week because we are going to have a launch video on the 10th for Secret Project 1. That’s when we will start talking about the title of it. So warnings for you. We will, starting on the 10th it will go wide, and we’ll start using the actual title for the book in updates and things on this channel. We will not use the titles for the next books. So that’s coming.

We have a really cool video on Wednesday. Is it Wednesday, Taylor? It’s Tuesday. Oh, tomorrow! We have a very cool video for you tomorrow. Please stop back and watch this video. We put a lot of work into it. We’re very happy with it. So Secret Project 1 is out for backers and is coming out for everyone else tomorrow.

So book update. I got through what my goal was, word count-wise, last month. I did another 30,000 words. I’m feeling very good about it. The issue is, I still have a few flashbacks to write. So far, it’s gone a little long. Big surprise for me. This is Stormlight 5. I do need to stop very soon and do revisions on Defiant. So I’ll be jumping into that very soon. So this will be the last time I have to delay, theoretically, but I’m going to be jumping out and doing revisions. The book’s sitting at 120,000 words, whatever that equates to in our percentages. It’s kind of hard to judge on these ones. But over, you know, 27%-ish, if we assume a 400,000-word book. Wait, no. Let’s see. 100,000 words would be 25%. Yeah, 27%-ish, between 27% and 28%. So if we assume 400,000 words but it’s not going to be 400,000 words. It’s going to be much longer. So around a quarter of the book is still finished, and looking really good. I’m very pleased with it.

And otherwise, watch for exciting events coming around Secret Project 1. We have very cool launch videos. We also will be doing things like a book club read on this channel. We’ll be doing some behind-the-scenes videos about the making of the book. I’ve got a lore video where I’m going to talk about the inspirations for worldbuilding and some of the real-world physics that inspired me to write this book. All of that’s coming up on this channel in the next few weeks. So keep an eye out for it, and I’ll be back next week with another update.

Hey, everyone. Brandon here from the future of the video that I’m interrupting but still your past. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the launch of the print version of Secret Project 1, and, you know, how you can get it from us. So we are going to be putting up on Tuesday, which is tomorrow, a preorder for this book. Why is it a preorder? Well, we need to fulfill the print versions for all the backers before we can send them to you. Just to reiterate, live tomorrow at noon my time. You’ll be able to preorder your print copies of Secret Project 1 in the special edition by Dragonsteel with the full art pictures inside, and that will be $55. And we will deliver those to you as soon as we get through delivering them to everyone else who backed the book.

Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. So, bit of a slower week this week, a shorter update. That’s because things are winding down a little bit for the holidays. But I still have some fun things for you.

First one is Stormlight 5. We are at, Bing!, 25%. This represents 100,000 words. Now let me say that is a fake 25%. I pretend that each Stormlight book is going to be 400,000 words, which means 4,000 words equals 1%, which means 100,000 words equals 25%. I think I did that math right. I’m an English major. Don’t sue me. But regardless, they actually are generally longer. Right? The first one was around 400,000 words and they’ve gotten progressively longer. The last one was 460,000 words. So it’s really 4,600 words equals 1%, which means that 25% is kind of cheating. Which means that likely we’ll eventually either have to go over 100% to finish the book or we’ll have to slow down on these percents. But you know where I am. I’m roughly a fourth of the way done, which is really exciting. In fact, I will consider myself an official fourth of the way done when I finish the current sequence that I’m on, and I’ll give an update on my social media when I’ve done that. I want to turn it into my team and then do the next sequence. And you’ll know we are at about one-fourth when that happens. So it’s going really well. I had a really great week writing this week. I’m super happy to be writing Stormlight again and I’m enjoying myself. So that’s good.

Next week, we will have a big post for you. It’s the State of the Sanderson. This is where I go over everything that I’ve been doing this last year and kind of give you updates on a lot of different things and just oftentimes rant or ramble on things that I’m very interested in. We will be doing a YouTube version of this as well where I’m, you know, in here talking to you for a while about the various things that I’m working on. So keep your eyes out for that. It’ll go live on BrandonSanderson.com, and then eventually here on YouTube, probably soon thereafter. So keep your eyes out for that.

Last thing is we have been doing some giveaways. So watch my social media. Just we’re doing a countdown to the State of the Sanderson, and coincidentally, the important holiday, Koloss Head-Munching Day, which happens every year on my birthday by complete coincidence. Either way, thank you guys so much for checking in on me, and I will be back next week with another update.

Hey! So welcome back to Weekly Updates. We took a week off, and it’s been a busy week for me. I had the holiday here in America, Thanksgiving. But I did get some writing done after that. And so I met my goal, just squeaked by it, for SandoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, of 30,000 words last month, which mostly was on Stormlight 5, which is good. Now I don’t actually have handy where my percentage bar is, so we’re, Bing!, going to put us at 22%. We’re probably a little bit beyond that but I’m going to be really conservative with those numbers because I usually count them at 4,000 words for a percent or 400,000 word book. This book’s going to be longer than that, so it’s probably better if we’re a little conservative with those percentages. I don’t feel like I’m a quarter of the way done with the book yet. So even though the word count might be there, I’m going to put us at 22%. It’s feeling really good. I had some really great writing sessions this last week.

So Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self leatherbound, they came out and the signed edition sold out very, very quickly. I do not have time to do another signed edition for quite a while. As you know, I’ve been focusing on getting signed copies ready for the Words of Radiance leatherbound, which is coming out next year. So if you want a copy of the Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self, they are gorgeous. We do have unsigned editions still available. And there’s not going to be a signed edition for quite some time. So just pointing that out. May want to get those ready for Christmas for people.

We also have a special day coming up this month, Koloss Head-Munching Day, which coincidentally, that famous holiday from Scadrial falls on my birthday, December 19th. We decided that we would do a bonus stream for you guys because I need to sign a whole bunch of Words of Radiance leatherbounds, and I’m not done yet. So we’re going to do a signing basically until I get done and I’m not sure how much that’s going to be but it’s going to be a while. So I’m going to sign a whole bunch of books and I hope you’ll join me on my birthday. I will probably be opening packs of Magic cards to reward myself, and we might have other fun things going on.

We will be releasing this month also the State of the Sanderson, which is my update on all the things that have happened this year. So be looking forward to that. We will probably do a video edition for YouTube for you guys, and there will also be one on my website.

So final thing today. We have the . We do one of these every year for charity. This year our charity is The School Zone at Primary Children’s Hospital. This is a cool charity that we support, which provides materials, reading materials and things like that for kids who are at the hospital who need to continue doing school work for longer stays and things like that, provides books to them and all kinds of fun things. So you can support that by buying one of our holiday ornaments. We want to make you aware there are actually two different colors. This is because the ornament was so popular we put in a second order. We couldn’t get it exactly right, the exact same color, for various supply chain reasons. So we do have both of these available, kind of a lighter red and a deeper red. So when you buy your ornament, which you can find the link in the description, just make sure you’re ordering the one that you want. You can see them kind of next to each other right there. So thank you guys all for supporting our efforts.

And I probably should point out that The Lost Metal is out and it hit the New York Times Bestseller List at number two, which is our highest placement ever for a Mistborn novel. So I’m very excited by that. I wanted to point that out. This time John Grisham did beat us. That’s okay. Last time we beat him. So it’s only fair that we let John, you know, this little newcomer writer, he’s a young, budding author, figure it’s probably okay to let him take the number one spot. Though we did beat him once audiobooks were counted. So there is that. But the New York Times list doesn’t count that. So anyway, thank you, guys. And if you haven’t read The Lost Metal, hey, it’s out.

Hey! Brandon with your Weekly Update.
So, Lost Metal is out. We had Dragonsteel 2022 last week. It was a smash success. It was huge. You guys are awesome. We had a wonderful time. There are multiple videos here on my channel where you can watch the livestreams of me doing a reading from Stormlight 5. You can watch me have to sit on the floor to play Magic as people steal my chair as part of a charity Magic game that I did. I also had an extended stint being forced to speak in Yoda-speak, and various other really fun things. Along those lines, we raised, among all the different things we did, $32,000 for charity, which I’m going to match. And so $64,000 for charity. That’s just incredible. Thank you all so much for contributing and for participating and all of that.
Lost Metal, if you didn’t know, it’s out. I said it before. But go check it out if you haven’t picked up a copy yet.
Stormlight. So, because of all of this, I have not worked on Stormlight at all. This means that I’ve got a busy week ahead of me this week with Thanksgiving and also me trying to make sure I catch up. So I’ll be posting my SandoWriMo updates across next week. Probably not one on Thursday because I want to give my social media team the time off as well. But I will get one out for you hopefully on Tuesday and Wednesday showing how I’ve been doing that week. So follow along. I’m hoping to get 30,000 this month despite everything that’s going on, and I think I can still make it but I am behind right now.
Now, let’s talk about the secret projects. So, in order to get the secret projects to those who weren’t part of the Kickstarter, we needed to partner with my publishers. This is TOR in the US and Gallant in the UK, as well as many fine publishers around the world. They are going to be releasing what we’re calling the commercial editions, which are standard editions in bookstores. If you want our special edition, we will have some extras of these. These are the fully illustrated with the nice covers and in the two-tone ink and all of these things, the Dragonsteel editions. We will have those coming. They’ll be more expensive than they were in the Kickstarter but we will have some of those for sale. But they’re going to be coming out, usually a couple of months after the secret projects themselves release to backers. That’s our goal. So we’ll be posting more about that coming up. You can watch my whole speech at Dragonsteel where I give some updates on that.
I do want to give you a warning. The publishers have had trouble understanding our desire to keep the titles and everything secret for those who don’t want to be spoiled. We have tried to work with them. We’ve tried to explain. And it’s just not working very well. It’s a very different thing that we’re doing and so their publicity teams’ wires are getting crossed. And so they have been releasing the titles. I gave them permission to put them on Amazon as their listings because that was kind of required by Amazon in order to get these up. But they’ve also been putting it in social media, so I’m going to warn you about spoilers there. We are working with them. We’re trying to get them to not spoil, or to keep them from being spoiled as much as possible. But this is a weird thing that we’re doing and it is kind of hard to get people to understand it. So we’re going to try to keep working.
But I’m going to warn you, TOR and Gallant, their social media teams haven’t quite understood why people might not want to even know the titles yet. This might—if we ever do anything like this in the future we’ll know better how to approach it. But for now, be wary of their social media. And we will retweet things on my social media. But our goal is to blur out anything that might be spoilery in regards to even the titles. We want to keep those who just don’t want to know what they’re getting at all, if there’s any of you left after this week of some of the spoilers being released, we’re going to try to do what we can to help you. I apologize for some of these things getting out there. It’s partially on me not being able to explain well enough what it is that we’re doing and why people might want to remain spoiler free.
So there’s probably no Weekly Update next week, as it’s a holiday week here in the US. But do watch social media for Cyber Monday deals. There should be lots of deals regarding my books going up over the next weekend and into the early next week. And we’ll try to grab all of those and post them for you on social media when they pop up for us.
Otherwise, I hope that those of you who are here in the US have a wonderful holiday week. I’m going to spend it with my nose to the grindstone, working on Stormlight 5.

Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. First off, you’re here for Stormlight 5, which is,
Bing! At 18%, slowly moving up. We are inching along. I had a pretty decent week doing SandoWriMo.
This is National Novel Writing Month, and I am posting my word counts every week on my subreddit r/Sanderson. So you can come by and post your word counts, things like that, see how I’m doing. I usually post on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
So we’ve got some big things for you this week. Number one, The Lost Metal, Wax and Wayne Book 4, is out tomorrow. You guys are excited for this book. I can tell because I got the preorder numbers today, and it is up 350% compared to the last Wax and Wayne book. So we’re pretty excited by that. Thank you, guys, for supporting the book. It will be live tomorrow, probably tonight, in eBook and audiobook, at like midnight. So if you somehow are watching this channel and didn’t know I have a book out
tomorrow—book out tomorrow!
We also have, in conjunction with that book out, we have a convention going on right now. Dragonsteel Expo 2022 is happening right now at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake. There should be some badges at the door. We have 400 left. So good. We added an extra couple thousand, and it looks like we’ve sold out a bunch of those. But we still have a few left at the door. And if you can’t make it, here are a couple of things that we’ve got coming up that you can do. Tonight. Tonight we have a charity Magic draft happening at my convention. We are going to livestream my games of that. And we are going to do something fun for you on that. We still want to work out a way, not 100% guaranteed, but my goal is that you’ll be able to steal cards from my deck and have them mailed to you. So we’re going to do something fun like that. Either way, even if we can’t do that, we’ll be streaming it and I’ll be playing against fans. It’ll be a lot of fun. So you can show up and watch me play Magic, if that’s your game. And even if you don’t, you can watch me perhaps be humiliated by fans as other people steal my cards out of
my deck so that I don’t have anything left to play.
Speaking of charity, last thing for you today, my charity, Lightweaver, does a holiday ornament
supporting Primary Children’s Hospital, one of our favorite local charities. And you can buy these one of two ways. They will be on sale at Dragonsteel this year, in person. You can go check them out, see how they look, pick up one. That’s your first chance. Sometime around Thanksgiving, we will post how the rest of you can get them from around the world. And so look for an update around then how you can get your holiday ornament, your Brandon Sanderson-themed holiday ornament.
That’s what I’ve got for you this week. Kind of a big week. Next week will probably be a boring update, at least hopefully. Hopefully, it will be an exciting update about how well everything went, but it will hopefully also be a boring exciting update. Either way, I’ll see you next week, and hopefully many of you at the convention.

Hey! It is time for your Weekly Update.
First off, I have gotten back into Stormlight 5. I actually only got about 2,000 words last week, and so the percentage bar probably hasn’t inched up yet. But I am working on that full time now because it is National Novel Writing Month and I always like to do something for National Novel Writing Month. Last year we did something called SandoWriMo, which I posted my word counts on r/Sanderson. We’re doing that again this year. You can go to r/Sanderson every week and, you know, see what my word count was, and post yours. I should be doing updates regularly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with some other days thrown in as well, potentially. So stop by. Have a discussion with the other Sanderfans who are doing NaNoWriMo this year.
A few other cool announcements. This is the Origins of The Wheel of Time, written by my friend Michael Livingston. He is a professor at The Citadel, and he is a medieval historian and a historian of Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time. And so this is a nonfiction book that he wrote about the mythology behind The Wheel of Time, the process of writing The Wheel of Time. He interviewed me for it. He talked to a lot of really cool people about The Wheel of Time. I just wanted to give it a shout-out. He is a great guy and a great writer and deserves your support.
This Friday we have the MTG Summit, which is here locally in Salt Lake City. Magic: The Gathering and various other fun stuff will be going on there. I’ll be showing off my cube. I’ll be there for one day of the convention and will be doing a cube draft with some celebrities. It’s going to be a fun time. So if you enjoy Magic, you can see me there.
But if you don’t enjoy Magic, or if you are planning on it, either way, Dragonsteel 2022 is the following week. So it is one week from today. This is the release launch party for The Lost Metal. And we did open up some more tickets and so there are still a few left for sale. So you should still be able to get tickets even at the door if you show up because we bought more space because enough people wanted to go. This will be a very fun time. But if you don’t want to go to the convention, my ending speech on Tuesday evening, so a week from today, is going to be open to the public, as usual. And so if you are local and you just want to see my reading and speech, we’ll have details about that for you next week. But that is Tuesday evening at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. So yeah, come see me.
And if not, The Lost Metal, Wax and Wayne 4, releases on November 15th, a week from today. You can go read chapter 16 right now on TOR.com, and r/Mistborn has a nice discussion of each of the chapters that have been very fun to follow along. If you’re posting there, I’ve enjoyed reading your posts. So I’m getting a chuckle out of all the things that you guys are doing over there.
So that’s our update. Next week is the big one. Next week is this year’s big book launch and convention. So I will try to make sure I have a Weekly Update for you. And otherwise, thank you, guys, as always, for supporting me in this weird thing that I love to do.

Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Secret Project 4 final draft, Bing! is done. I actually finished that mid-last week a few days ahead of schedule. So I’m feeling pretty good about that one. That means that all of the secret projects are now a wrap. I have done all of my drafting, all of my revising, and we are just hoping that the books come in in time. We are in very close touch with our printers. Supply chains are pretty weird these days. But regardless, on the 1st of January, those who backed the Kickstarter, you’ll be getting your eBook and audiobook, if you ordered one, delivered to you and hopefully very soon thereafter the print books. I’m very excited for these. I think you guys are going to love each of them. I had a blast doing this revision on the last one.
We are going to be doing a Halloween stream today. Tonight at 7pm MDT we are we’ll be doing a Halloween stream. I will be in costume. Adam will be in costume. We haven’t decided 100% on all the things we’ll be doing but hopefully, there’ll be some fan mail. I have been sent some special treats for me to open. Adam doesn’t even know what these are. He’s shaking his head. But I know what they are. I’ll tell him about it in a minute. It’s going to be really fun.
Speaking of Livestreams, in December, just kind of, you know, keep in mind, in December is when we do our spoiler stream. We do one of these in December, and one of these in June. So the stream today is not a spoiler stream. This is a fun, really relaxed Halloween stream in costume. Generally, we are a little sillier and a little more relaxed on these streams. The spoiler stream in December will be very serious about our very detailed Cosmere lore questions. So save those up for then.
Two other little announcements we have for you. We have restocked our unsigned Hero Of Ages Leatherbounds. So anyone who added a copy in BackerKit during the Kickstarter should soon receive an email that it’s shipped to you. Leftovers are going to be put in our store once we’ve got the shipping of Backer add-ons done. So very soon we should have Hero Of Ages Leatherbounds up for sale. We don’t know yet when The Well of Ascension will arrive. Again, supply chains these days are in mass chaos, and getting books printed is kind of a roll of the dice when they arrive sometimes. Not because anyone is doing anything poorly it’s just, you know, our printer reps are fantastic but they don’t know when cover material will arrive. That’s what we’re waiting on for the secret projects right now. Everything is printed and ready but the material that you make the covers out of is back-ordered and might be coming hopefully at the end of this month sometime. So anyway, we’ll keep you up to date on that.
The Lost Metal preview chapters are still on TOR.com, chapter 14. Join the discussion on r/Mistborn. They’re doing a cool thread on each of these chapters over on Reddit. Otherwise, I will be back next week for another Weekly Update.
I should mention, I guess, this isn’t on my list but I should mention, we’ll be doing SandoWriMo starting tomorrow. What is SandoWriMo? Well, November is National Novel Writing Month, and last year we had fun posting my word counts. We’re going to be doing that again. We will post my daily word counts on r/Sanderson. I warn you, I am only able to consistently write three days a week. So you’ll see updates from me on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesdays most regularly, sometimes an extra one on Friday depending on how things are going. And you’ll just be able to kind of pace yourself against me as your, “pace car,” a somewhat fast-paced car but nonetheless, see if you can beat me. It’s not as hard as you would think. So if you’ve been wanting to write that story of yours, starting tomorrow’s a good day to do it. And we’ll be posting some updates as we go along through the month. My goal is to get to 100,000 words by January 1st, hopefully, 50,000 of that in November and another couple, you know, 10 or 20 or 30,000 come December. So anyway, we will give you an update next week on how that’s going.

Hi. I am here with your Weekly Update again. So first things first, I am working on Secret Project 4, where I am, Bing! 70% of the way done. This might seem a small amount, since last week I was 50%, and I should have been a little further along. But there were some movie things that came in and sucked up about two of my days this week so I’ve only had one solid day of work on it with a little bit on the other days.
I do need to turn this in by the last day of October. So I need to push hard next week and get through it so that I can start doing BrandoWriMo where in November I’ll be posting my word counts every week for those who are doing National Novel Writing Month.
I have a few cool things coming up. We have the MTG Summit on November 11th. I’ll be showing off my cube. So if you’re a Magic fan and you want to see my powered cube, you might want to go to MTG Summit.

We also have our convention, Dragonsteel, coming up. Dragonsteel 2022 is [Nov. 14-15… the same week] as MTG Summit. I know many of you are excited by this and already have your tickets. If you don’t and you
want to come, I want to warn you, you’ll probably want to pick up your badges before the 28th. Because around that time, details will be on our socials, but there’s going to be a price increase on the badges for Dragonsteel Con and a lot of the perks won’t be available with those new badges. We just kind of are needing to get some final numbers on how many people are attending the convention. And so if you are thinking and on the fence, you may want to pick up your badge this week because they are going to go up in price.
At Dragonsteel we will be doing a charity Magic draft. You can get tickets for that. There are 64 spots available for a chance to play with me. The tickets are $25 bucks. All of your $25 bucks will go to charity. I’m donating the cards. The proceeds go to the School Zone at Primary Children’s Hospital. I talked about this the previous week. It’s a charity that we really like.
Along with that we are going to be doing something very fun at Dragonsteel that you may want to be aware of. Because Dan is going to be doing a very cool thing. I’m not sure how much we’ve announced
about it, but it will be for charity, and you will be able to watch, hopefully, online and participate. And it will involve stealing cards out of my Magic draft deck. So keep an eye on this. If you can’t attend Dragonsteel you might want to have the opportunity to start stealing cards out of my deck as I’m playing it against people, and they will be signed and delivered via mail to you, hampering my ability to try to beat the people who are coming to the 64 spots in the tournament. So keep an eye out. We’ll have
something cool for you on that.
Speaking of The Lost Metal, we have the preview chapter still going live. Chapter 12 is up. There’s a discussion on r/Mistborn over at Reddit.
So the last thing is we have restocked our t-shirts in the store. We have lots of fun things coming up with Dragonsteel. We’ll be trying to get lots of cool videos from it for you for this channel.
And you should be aware we are planning our yearly Halloween Livestream. If you remember, I came in a very awesome costume last time. I have a better one even this year, outdoing myself, I believe. This will be on Halloween evening. So for those of you who are bored at home giving out candy, if you want to hang out with me while you’re doing that and see the incredible costume that I will have. Adam’s might be even better than mine. That will be on the 31st of October, that Monday, and we’ll be here answering your questions, perhaps having tricks and treats of various forms.
And anyway, I appreciate you, as always, coming by and hanging out with me and listening to my updates. And I will see you next week for our Halloween Livestream one week from today.