Yeah, and you’ve also made mention about that you feel like maybe there’s not enough—now, let me make sure I’m quoting you correctly—there’s not a lot of standalone fantasy, and Warbreaker was that standalone fantasy, and now you’ve gone to writing the Wheel of Time which is obviously not a standalone fantasy. What do you feel the difference is; like how do you get from a book which is all-encompassing, you know, a series of books like the Wheel of Time. And how do you as a writer say, “OK, I can still write that standalone fantasy that’s going to have the same impact as, in the same—hopefully—same fan base as a longer series, a trilogy or, you know, obviously Wheel of Time is going to be twelve, thirteen, fourteen books.”
I do love big series. I mean, this is what… This is what got me into fantasy; these huge monster series. And so I think every fantasy author—not every, but most of us have a deep-seated love for the great big epic. And I’ve wanted to do one of those eventually myself. But at the same time, there are so many ideas I have, bouncing here and there, that I feel sometimes I just want to write a single book. This was particularly true when I broke in; my first book was a standalone, Elantris . And one of the reasons why I didn’t write a sequel to that was, sometimes I, as a reader, got little bit annoyed when I would see a new author’s book on the shelf, that I had never heard of, and it said, “book one of nine.” Or something like this. And it threw me as a fantasy fan into a conundrum. I’ve never tried this author before. I don’t know if I’m going to enjoy their books. If I try the first one, and I like it, I’ve just committed myself to spending the next twenty years reading these books and doing this. If I dislike it, then I’ve committed myself to never finding out what happened to all these characters that I’ve read about. You know, even if you don’t like a book, you wonder what happens. And so it puts you in this position where it’s hard to win. And so, I loved it when I could pick up a standalone by an author to try them out, to see if I liked their style. Tad Williams did this with Tailchaser’s Song . And so when I first published, I wanted to do a standalone that people could pick my work up and say, “OK. This is what Brandon Sanderson’s like.” And I actually really like that I’m releasing Warbreaker right before the Wheel of Time, because there’s that same opportunity. People can go pick up Warbreaker and can read a standalone, one volume book by me before they… So they can know what I’m like.
Before they pick up that…
Before they pick up that Wheel of Time book. They don’t have to go and read a big long series of mine; they know they can pick up that one and get closure and resolution. I like both forms, quite a bit. I am going to do a big epic. It’s probably gonna be called the Stormlight Archive . The first book’s called The Way of Kings . I’ve mentioned it a little bit on my web site. And it’s coming, and I’ve been planning it for years and years and years, like we tend to do; it’s actually been going for about eight years. And so I am going to do that. But I’ve always wanted to be stopping and doing the standalones. In fact, I’ll probably do one or two—or two or three—in the Stormlight Archive and then do a standalone somewhere else. And then do two or three and then do a standalone. Because something about that form really appeals to me as well. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana is just a beautiful book that wouldn’t be the same if it were a big series. Just that one standalone. And the book that got me into fantasy originally was Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. She eventually did some sequels to that many years later, but for many years it was a standalone. And I loved how it was a standalone, and… I liked that form. So I had planned to always be releasing some of those, every now and then.
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