Brandon Sanderson Signing!

So I attended Brandon Sanderson's signing today in San Fransisco at a great little bookshop called Borderlands Books. Its completely fantasy/sci-fi dedicated and its kind of amazing guys. So visit it if you're in town, because its got everything there to geek out, and the people are SUPER super nice.

But anyways. Speaking of super nice people, Brandon Sanderson is one of them! and I'm so glad that's the case, because if my inspiration and role-model of a writer were a jerk, that would...be sad. But he's super awesome so its Ok!

The Man, The Legend, The Sanderson.

So first he did a reading from the prelude (aka, prologue to the prologue) of The Way of Kings, his new book. And already I am hooked and can't wait to actually read it for myself. Its unfortunately been a long day with a lot of choir performances before and after the signing, so time has been sadly lacking.

The Way of Kings is a gorgeous book, possibly the only tome of its kind that I have ever seen. Its filled with in-world illustrations (because sometimes we forget that characters can be documentors as well) and it just seems like a really intricate piece of fantasy that needs some heavy duty reading. And I'm very very excited to do that.

I got a question in during Brandon's Q&A About book endings, asking how he approached them and if he knew how books ended as he wrote them.

So what he said was that he plots out books backwards, but writes them forwards. He outlines the big climactic events and works back to figure out how they happen.

BUT, and this was the interesting part to me, the characters are the most important part of the writing process from there. Namely, if a character forms in a way that doesn't allow the outline to play out a planned, then the outline gets chucked and redone.

This was worrying to me because with the Will of Prometheus, I don't know how it ends yet. I have a vague idea of how it ends, but (I guess in the tradition of Stephen King) I'm trying to discovery write this piece.

I guess I have my vague ideas and if something better comes along as things form more concretely, I let that take over.

Revelations like that happen all the time for me. Just last night I realized that the reason why the plot outline I thought I was going to pursue wasn't going to work was because I was trying to write the story as a murder mystery, when really it isn't a pure detective story. Its an epic redemption tale that happens to feature a detective and a serial killer.

that was huge because it means that I don't have to conceal the killer most of the time. The reason why THAT doesn't work is because...well, there's no way to conceal him. He's at the center of the story. its HIS story.

It'd be like trying to tell Star Wars from the perspective of Wedge Antilles.

Note: If that was too nerdy for you, I've listed a couple other (probably equally nerdy) analogies to help you out.

It'd be like trying to tell the Lord of the Rings from the perspective of Treebeard. (except that would be pretty cool...)

Like telling the Titanic (the Leonardo DiCaprio one) from the perspective of the captain. How foolish!

Like telling Harry Potter from the perspective of Professor Flitwick, or, dare I say it, Twilight from the perspective of a rational human being!

that kid Mike comes to mind.

BUT I ramble. Back the Sanderson!

He's got a running joke with his fans that people give him Magic, the Gathering cards because...he's a junkie. He's a HUGE nerd, basically, which is the best thing ever, basically.

A slightly more accurate The Man. The Legend. The Sanderson

So I not only got him a couple booster backs, but I did some original artwork for him, which he seemed to appreciate.

Here's a crappy photo of it:

If you can't read that words, it says "The King of Magic Systems"...because that is exactly what he is!

So he signed my books, putting in a note in the Way of Kings that said "Thank you so much for the art!"

because he's amazing that way.

ANYWAYS - here are the books I picked up at Borderlands today:

1 Hardcover Way of Kings (signed)
1 Hardcover Mistborn (signed)
1 Hardcover Well of Ascension (signed)
1 Hardcover Hero of Ages (signed)
3 Paperback Mistborn
2 Paperback Warbreaker
1 Paperback Elantris

AND here's a picture of my Brandon Sanderson collection. Because...its awesome.



So I got to tell him the story of how I walked into a bookstore one day, looking to rekindle my love of fantasy, and picked up Mistborn. I got to tell him about how that changed everything for me, about how he inspired me to get into writing fantasy. He said that he loves hearing that and to keep at it.

And so keep at it I shall.

He said he'll post the picture later, so maybe I can get some notoriety and a quality photo up when that happens.

Tomorrow I aim to blast the big post about the Will of Prometheus, that I can direct people to when they ask what I'm working on these days. Its pretty exciting stuff for me, and I'm thinking I'll post some sample chapters as well.

If I remember something I forgot, I'll add it in to this post as an edit. :D

A Symbol of Tragedy

This blog post was originally written for the other blog I started for my AP Lit class, but its also very relevant here.

the assignment:

Bring in a symbol of tragedy. This can be anything but please take time to think about this assignment so our contributions are multidimensional and thought provoking.

I admit I am sorely tempted to make this my symbol of tragedy.

"This was once part of a tree."

in actuality though, I'll probably go with the jester hat. I mean hey, I wrote a musical which also happened to be a tragedy, and the hat is a symbol in it. so that works!

also, the whole thing was sort of a...failure in an already dark downward (thankfully self-contained) spiral in my life. and really, who doesn't love layering in their symbolism?


Ogres love layered symbolism, onions love layered symbolism - you get the point.

so the above statements may need some background. As I said, I wrote a musical, and for the better part of last year I tried to produce a low-key workshop production of it. However, this soon proved to be a more challenging than I thought it would be. but first some more background on the background (read: layers)

the musical was a sort of semi-autobiographical uber-cathartic piece that focused on an immature crown-prince who finds himself simultaneously struck by the enormity of the looming responsibility implied by his uncle (the king)'s severe illness and very strong feelings for a court jester. I'll give you a moment to navigate that sentence before I continue.

The jester, with a sort of (retrospectively) psychotic obsession with truth and perception and truth in action and society and things of that nature (sort of a medieval Diogenes of Sinope, but with singing and dancing and...bisexuality, but we'll get to that later) basically leads the prince on for a while before ultimately running off with his sister (who has issues of her own of course, being a lesbian and a princess in the 1600's...obviously my sense of anachronism wasn't fully developed)...

This man + singing + dancing + bisexuality = broken reality.

So that's why it was sort of a tragedy. The play ends with the prince set to become king (because his uncle died and that was sad) and the jester and his sister run away to leave him completely alone to the task.

but on the bright side the token villain (a nefarious taxman named Quinn) is ultimately thwarted and his henchman, the inventor of a beverage known as 'Orange Juice', takes his place in the new regime.

as I said, its an anachronistic, often silly piece. but its got nearly 30 pieces of original music in it.

30 pieces of music. along with many, many spoken scenes that often had the characters waxing painfully verbose on issues of philosophy (in the guise of trying to justify homosexuality to medieval sensibilities, usually...) it was a long play, and a hard one to produce. But another problem was that I was dealing with a small cast of students who weren't really able to commit themselves to the project as much as I (regrettably) expected of them. Even still, I (ironically) tried to take the brunt of the responsibility on myself in that I was directing as I was scoring music as I was putting together sets and light designs and costumes and props and all manner of THING while (parenthetically) forgetting to gauge how I was acting towards those involved.

What basically resulted was three actresses in lead roles (namely the jester, the princess and the other princess I forgot to mention) withdrew in quick succession. At first I was able to keep it up by bringing in a last minute replacement for the jester, but the scheduling of the single performance was in line with AP testing that year, and the show was shortly after killed off.

I tried to play off maturely (mostly to make up for my conduct as everything was in the process of falling apart) with a cast-wide email explaining that although we were done I had no regrets because we all learned a lot and a whole bunch of other hippie crap I was having trouble convincing myself I believed.

However, only a couple weeks later my irrational anger began surfacing through really immature, vicious pranks directed at those I managed to convince myself were at least partly to blame. the consequences were less than pleasant, and I spent my 18th birthday at home - on a fairly hilariously timed one-day suspension.

'The Jester' has since become a symbol in my mind for another kind of tragedy, in that it sort of exposed me in quick succession to a lot of my flaws and weaknesses, and then became the arena in which I failed to overcome them in addition to the more palpable failure of the canceled production.

So there's the verbose blog post on that. Catharsis through writing still appears to be my style...some things never change.

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the post ended there, but I suppose I'll add here that yes, I do hope to try again someday with this piece. I've certainly needed some time off from it though.

The project I'm currently working on is a fantasy novel titled (for now) the Will of Prometheus, and its an interesting mix of political intrigue, murder-mystery and magical war, with a good mix of psychological drama in there as well. There will definitely be blog posts about it coming up, because I could talk about it for a long time.

[EDIT: The piece is now titled 'The Will of Thedosis" - for obvious reasons.]

I will say though that it is heavily influenced by the work of Brandon Sanderson, who is a god among men and a true storyteller among writers.

so if you've read his 'Mistborn' trilogy, know its a little something like that. I'll be glad to talk about that soon, especially after that bitter pill you just scrolled past.

also! consistency in updates! obviously something I'm a total whiz at, right? Having a readership you have to actually hunt down at least means that you aren't beholden to anyone to generate content which is GREAT...

See y'all later.