WOW! I just went to the signing today. I was telling myself, "This is going to be fun, but I shouldn't expect to be entertained the entire time. It's mainly getting to see the author in person and getting signatures." I knew it was going to be nice but I didn't want to expect too much in case it was low-key. Boy, was I wrong.
There were fewer people there than I expected, maybe 20 or 30. I was very excited just to see him, and I have to say that he looks quite different from his picture in his books. Actually, he mentioned that and said that he had his picture taken by a friend who was practicing photography and making normal people look really awesome. Brandon said that a picture that actually looks like him is going to be used in The Gathering Storm.
At the beginning, he started off by introducing himself and talking about The Wheel of Time, because a few people were there just about that and hadn't read any of his material yet. I didn't realize that Harriet was the main editor of Tor even before she met Robert Jordan. Even in person, Brandon's a great storyteller. He might be a bit long-winded, but I was captivated the entire time. His story about his first unpublished books, his first publishing, and books after that are amazing.
And yes, he read from The Way of Kings. It was just as awesome as I thought it would be, but although I wanted to hear the entire prologue (and the rest of the book too), it was a bit short (about half the prologue). One of the magic-systems is gravity manipulation! That's awesome! I wonder if
all the magic systems will run on Stormlight (which I don't know much about yet).
I really like how he makes personal signings that are very special. I had him sign my copies of paper-back Elantris and Mistborn: The Hero of Ages, and my beautiful hard-cover Warbreaker. I asked him to make a personal signing (put "to Brendan" in it—that's my name) for Warbreaker, and he also wrote "My breath to yours" in it which was a nice touch. He also drew the AonDor marking for Spirit below his signature in my copy of Elantris. Thanks Brandon!
The Q&A was interesting. He did a lot of talking about the Wheel of Time, and even after reading tons on his website and some in forums as well, I still learned new things about his adventures of writing this new series. I have to say, he's quite brilliant. He talked about how he decided to go about splitting AMoL into 3, and how for the first two parts he took neither the Robert Jordan approach or the George R. R. Martin approach. Robert Jordan split the 10th book of WoT into two, and people didn't like that the character arcs and the plot arcs don't wrap up in book 10. GRRM split the cast in half for each book, choosing only half the characters for each book and covering their entire plots. Mr. S decided to go halfway between these, putting the bulk of two main story-lines in the first AMoL book yet giving a small mention to the other characters so we got to see what they were doing in the meantime, and then reversing the focus in the next book so that we'd get to see more of the characters we'd only seen a few chapters' worth of heads-up to in the previous book. I love how he's taking the WoT very seriously and how he's probably going to be the best choice to finish it for that reason.
Finally I asked my question. This is hilarious, and true, please believe me. I asked, "Is The Way of Kings going to be driven more by adventure, or more by politics? Is it going to be more like WoT or more like GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire?" He responded, "It's funny that you should ask that, because when I presented this idea to my writing group [ x ] years ago"—I don't remember how many he said—"I said, 'This is going to be half like WoT, and half like A Song of Ice and Fire.'" Wow! It's so cool that my favorite author's favorite authors are my other favorite authors too. That made my day for the third time.
He then showed a bit of art to the people who hung around for The Way of Kings (not stuff that's going to appear in the novel, just stuff his friend did I think) and talked about a whole bunch of stuff that I just typed up but then deleted be cause I realized that he might not want people circulating all this stuff online. He says he doesn't hold back enough on talking.
He also talked about a novel he's going to write one day, Scribbler. He showed us pictures on that too, and I have to say, this author is brilliant. He's inspirational and terrifying, encouraging and discouraging at the same time. He writes so well that it makes me think, "I'll
never be able to do anything close to that," and it scares me but then he goes and explains how he does a lot of what he does and it's very educational and inspiring.
My friend missed out on so much.
PS: Are there rules against writing posts this long?