Timewaster's Guide Archive

Side note:  I'm making preparations to do a Stormlight Archive fan site, although someone else seems to have official status for Stormlight Archive (Roshar.net).  I'll be watching Hoids Compendium with interest and hope you guys do a great job with it.

Roshar sounds like it may develop a wiki, but you guys also seem to have a wiki in mind.  Since your site overarches all of Brandon's work, itd make sense to contact others (Roshar and Mistborn Empire) and see if you can get everybody on board with contributing to the Hoids Compendium wiki so there is one chief source that everyone can go to for encyclopedic info about any Sanderson book or series.

Recommending...

Naomi Novik's Temeraire series

S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series (has in-character homages to Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time)

Don't expect them to be as smashing as Mistborn or Wheel of Time, they're more on the order of Brent Weeks - well-done and very fun.

I grabbed both new releases today.

Out here in podunk, Kansas (read: anywhere but Topeka, Lawrence, Kansas City, or Wichita), there's a serious dearth of real bookstores (Borders, B&N, even Half-Price Books - none).

Tried the skimpy mall Waldenbooks, which only had 1 old-version Final Empire paperback and one Elantris.  I was worried, but apparently Hastings recognizes Brandon's appeal, because they had several copies of WoA and the new FE.

I don't rush to buy books very often, but on the strength of my reading of FE, Brandon is worth the show of selling power.

"Stories that spark effective sequels do so [...] because there's more than one good story to be told in the world they've created."  - Ansen Dibell, 'Plot'

... but after a writer comes up with a world where more than one good story waits to be told, he isn't obligated to tell any more.  By all means, write in and tell him how much you loved that world and story, and how disappointed you were to hear no more are planned, but when you start to get irate or accusatory, you're just making a gluteus maximus of yourself.

Any time you publish a really good standalone volume of speculative fiction, I think some readers will see obvious potential for another good story, so there will be many who feel disappointed when they find out you have no plans to write one.  I love huge worlds and epic multi-volume series that practically generate thousands of character possibilities by themselves, but I think someone does need to make a stand and get plenty of one-off works out there.  If there aren't any stories that stick to one book under 400 pages, it will get harder to attract the new casual reader to fantasy & sci-fi.  They'll all be intimidated away by the huge pile of reading they have to undertake to "get the whole thing."

So I expect to be somewhat disappointed at the cutoff when I finish Elantris (it's sitting in my to-read pile now), but at the same time I can also support the decision not to automatically do a sequel.

I've noticed that despite the fact that Brandon is writing aMoL now, all of the speculation on this board is still mistborn (a good 95%) and while this isn't a terrible thing, it's a little disheartening as a WoT fan.

It's less disheartening for me as a WoT fan and someone just starting on a serious writing project of my own.  While I hope that WoT fans check out Brandon's other works and like his original worlds as much as (or more than) aMoL, it's probably better if the WoT stays mostly on WoT-themed sites (I'm biased, because I run one, but it's my writer mindset that's talking here).   There is so much WoT "baggage" that is totally unrelated to Brandon's work on aMoL and his own worlds that I think it would be a shame if it spilled over to his site/blogs/this forum, which should be mostly about his stuff.  Would you want to log on here and see people debating who killed Asmodean?