Hey! Brandon here for your Weekly Update

In this Weekly Update, I have a couple of cool things for you. The first one is to announce we have gotten the last piece of swag from the Kickstarter rewards, the playing cards. Or we have been shipped them. They haven’t arrived yet, but they have been shipped. Which means that when those get here, we will collate all of them and be sending everyone their final shipment of swag, which I’m very excited to do because it looks like we’ll be able to start shipping late this month, early next month, and everyone should have their swag and everything in hand well before the one-year mark of the Kickstarter, which was always our goal. It’s looking really great. So I am happy to announce that to you.

Other big announcement is I have finished the prewriting for The Lost Metal, the fourth Wax and Wayne book. I am ready to start writing. In fact, by the time you get this, I’m recording this on Friday this time, by the time you get this, I will probably have spent Monday writing new material. So we can make the progress bar go to 100 for the prewriting, and we can begin the progress bar on the actual book.

Last week in the Weekly Update, I asked the question, which of the two designs you all liked better in regard to the UK mini-hardcovers of Stormlight. And you chose the watermarked versions. Some of you couldn’t tell the difference. I’ll admit, the first time I looked at them I’m like, “Uh?” It’s very subtle. But 80% to 20%, overwhelmingly you preferred the watermarked editions. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to get those in the States or in Canada. I know that they will be in the UK, mainly in Europe and Australia. I think they’ll be available in all of those places. And other parts of the world I don’t know about. But we’ll see what we can do. If you’re interested in getting them, there are places you can order UK editions around the world. Book Depository does that. So anyway, thank you for that.

In the comments I saw that one of you was asking about my pre-writing process. And the main place to look for that is my lecture series. I do two weeks on plotting. And that would be the place to look there. But in short to your answer for this one, what I did was, there were three big steps. The beginning was trying to—I wrote character, setting, plot, together in a document. And I then did a subheading for each of the main characters. For this book it’ll be Wax, Wayne, Steris, and Marasi. And I said, all right, what are their character arcs? How do they change? What do they want in this book? What’s going on with them? And that was the first pillar I wanted to hit. I wanted to make sure that everybody was working, and that I knew where they were all going and where they would end. Because this is the last book of that sequence and I want the ending to be spectacular and things like that.

The next part was setting. And in this mostly it was developing the magic system, making sure that the things that I’m doing with it, the new ideas that are coming in in development are in line with the general goals for the Cosmere and for Scadrial, and that everything that I wanted to do worked within the bounds of the magic, and bouncing that off of my team and making sure that I was explaining things well, why things worked like they did.

And then the last part was to construct the actual plot. This is what is happening? What are people wanting to do? How am I weaving in character arcs to this large construct that is the plot of the book? And that took about two weeks for this book. It’s a little deceptive because I generally only spend four days a week working on this stuff and one day a week working on other things, mostly interviews, YouTube sort of stuff, some video game stuff I can’t announce yet, things like that.

That was about eight days of work, roughly, to get that outline into shape, and we are now moving on to the writing process. If you want to know more, you can watch the lecture series. Otherwise, I’ll be back, theoretically, next week, with an update of how the first week of writing on the book went. Thank you, guys, all for your responses last week. It really helped us to make our decision.