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.
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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.