Author Topic: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)  (Read 6187 times)

EUOL

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It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« on: May 24, 2004, 09:30:41 AM »
So, with a nice 12:00am - 6:30am writing session, I finally finished off the new book.  The full title:

Mistborn: Book One
The Final Empire

Pages (Manuscript): 1065
Pages (Times New roman): 803
Word Count (MS Word): 205,739
Size:  1,375 KB
Chapters: 39+epilogue

Planning Begun: November 2003
First Chapter Begun:  Jan 28, 2004
Last Chapter Finished: May 24, 2004

Other interesting facts:
* This is the first book I've written completely as a 'professional' author.
* The most number of pages I wrote in one day while working on this book was 64.  (Last Friday.  When I get near the end, It's tough to stop....)
* Number of pages the book was PLANNED to be: 1,000.  (I'm getting pretty good at this, eh people?  No more accidentally going over by 300 pages.)
* I am very tired.

(Yawn.)  Okay, now I can stop goofing off and get back to editing the book I'm SUPPOSED to be working on.

http://www.BrandonSanderson.com

"Technically, I don't even have a brain."--Fellfrosch

Spriggan

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #1 on: May 24, 2004, 09:32:15 AM »
Congrats.
Screw it, I'm buying crayons and paper. I can imagineer my own adventures! Wheeee!

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #2 on: May 24, 2004, 09:40:27 AM »
woot!
you like, write faster than Piers Anthony.

EUOL

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #3 on: May 24, 2004, 09:43:44 AM »
Heh.  But not as fast as Scott Card.  I've heard that he rips through books in about a month or so.  (Though he does A LOT of planning.)

I will point out that this is a first draft.  It needs some serious editing.
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House of Mustard

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #4 on: May 24, 2004, 10:48:00 AM »
So, if this is Book One, how does it relate to the other Mistborn book?  That was the first book of yours I'd read.
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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #5 on: May 24, 2004, 11:28:49 AM »
Maybe he's going for a new type of trilogy. Where you have the three main books, but with each book there is a trilogy to that. So Book One has 3 books to it, Book Two has 3, etc. So in an essence for a trilogy you'll have nine books. Really quite ingenious if I must say so.
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Maxwell

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #6 on: May 24, 2004, 09:30:51 PM »
that's awesome
where can I get a copy of one of your books, I wann know what your writing is like...
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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #7 on: May 24, 2004, 09:39:09 PM »
You can't. Only those of us with psychic abilities can read them, for they are written in the night sky in letters of fire. Their majesty and glory are too much for your pathetic little mind to grasp.

Speak no more of this matter.
If you're ever in an argument and Entropy winds up looking staid and temperate in comparison, it might be time to cut your losses and start a new thread about something else :)

Fellfrosch

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #8 on: May 24, 2004, 09:43:47 PM »
Actually, some of them may appear on brandonsanderson.com eventually. Just the ones that are unpublishible. Or you can wait for Tor to publish them, which the first comes out in May 2005.
The Folly of youth is to think that intelligence is a subsitute for experience. The folly of age is to think that experience is a subsitute for intelligence.

fuzzyoctopus

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #9 on: May 24, 2004, 11:31:52 PM »
Quote
You can't. Only those of us with psychic abilities can read them, for they are written in the night sky in letters of fire. Their majesty and glory are too much for your pathetic little mind to grasp.

Speak no more of this matter.


Actually there are copies of each of his books, buried in a lead-lined shelter under the great Nebraska Mountains.
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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #10 on: May 24, 2004, 11:36:41 PM »
FOOL! You betray the great work to the heathen masses!
If you're ever in an argument and Entropy winds up looking staid and temperate in comparison, it might be time to cut your losses and start a new thread about something else :)

Fellfrosch

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #11 on: May 25, 2004, 12:14:53 AM »
HoM:  This book is kind of a 're-envisioning' of Mistborn.  The first Mistborn version I wrote had this absolutely amazing world and magic system, but the characters were very weak and the plot was so-so.  Even as I finished it, I knew it would need a revision.

Then, later, I wrote Final Empire--the book I finished when our writing group finally dissolved.  This book had much better characters, but the world/magic was very weak.  

As I finished WAY OF KINGS (back in November of 2003) I began to fiddle with new potential projects.  I began outlining WAY OF KINGS 2, but I knew that KINGS itself was likely to undergo some major revisions, and I wasn't quite sure where the characters would be for the beginning of the second book.  So, I decided to delay writing that.  I also fiddled with an ELANTRIS sequel, but I wasn't certain Tor wanted one of those or not.  

As I worked, the idea of a MISTBORN rewrite tempted me more and more.  I had another idea for a cool plot, and was intending to develop it into its own book, but it didn't have characters or a setting yet.  It occurred to me that the MISTBORN setting would work very well, especially if I borrowed some characters and concepts from FINAL EMPIRE.

In the end, after a few months of planning, the three pieces--MISTBORN magic and Setting, FINAL EMPIRE characters and politics, and the new plot--clicked together very nicely.  I was extremely pleased with the results, since MISTBORN and FINAL EMPIRE are the two books I've written that I was the most disappointed in.  This project would give me the opportunity to redeem the original ideas from both stories, and improve on them.

I called the resulting book MISTBORN: FINAL EMPIRE out of Homage, though "Mistborn" is the title I expect to stick (instead of the subtitle, kind of ala Star Wars: A New Hope.)  Time, and reads from my writing groups and friends, will tell me if my experiment was a success or not.

----
Quote
that's awesome
where can I get a copy of one of your books, I wann know what your writing is like...


Well, you have several options, TFO.  The first is to wait until 2005, when ELANTRIS will be released nationally.  You'll be able to get it at any bookstore in the nation, theoretically.

The second, and an interesting possibility, is to go to your local college library and see if you can get them to order DRAGONSTEEL for you through inter-library-loan from BYU.  It was my honors thesis, and is the book a lot of the people on the forum know me for.  (I'll be doing a rewrite of it one of these years.  My intention is to release the DRAGONSTEEL series once I've established myself, and use it to--hopefully--get out of the midlists and into the bestsellers.)

I think that it would be fairly easy to get it through ILL, though you would probably have to find someone going to the university to order it for you.  

The third option is to hang around long enough on the forums, and know me long enough, that I agree to send you an electronic copy for review purposes.  I will warn you, however, I'm very slow to offer this to people I don't know.  These books are my livelihood, and while I'm not worried about someone 'stealing' them and trying to publish them under their own name (something that just doesn't happen, despite what people think) I AM worried about someone throwing it up on their web-pages or releasing it onto the internet.  This would get me into serious contractual trouble with Tor, and might weaken my sales.

It's not that I'm not a trusting person.  It's just that the more electronic copies of these books there are laying around, the more likely it is that an accident will happen.  People tend to read my books and then tell their friends and family 'Hey read this!  I'll email it to you.'  And, well, you can probably guess why I'm a bit wary.  So far, I've only sent a book I'm currently working on to ONE person I haven't met face-to-face first.  

(Which reminds me.  Charlie, you ever going to give me a write-up on KINGS?  I'm looking at revising that one sometime in July.  If you have time to type up some comments, I'd appreciate it.)

I could probably be convinced to send one of my older books more easily (as 42 said, I might publish these on-line anyway), though most of these I consider my 'intellectual properties', and am intending to do rewrites/revisions in the worlds.  


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"Technically, I don't even have a brain."--Fellfrosch

Maxwell

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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #12 on: May 25, 2004, 12:17:55 AM »
I think I'll wait for a hard copy from the stores I cant stand reading anything that's more than two pages on a computer.
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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #13 on: May 25, 2004, 12:25:16 AM »
Dragonsteel rocks.

And once you feel you're famous enough, I'll bug you to get Pandora out even though it's sci-fi.
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Re: It is Finished! (Mark XIV)
« Reply #14 on: May 25, 2004, 12:38:17 AM »
Whitesands is still my favorite. Dragonsteel was cool, but I hated the ending.
The Folly of youth is to think that intelligence is a subsitute for experience. The folly of age is to think that experience is a subsitute for intelligence.