In France, your juvenile series Alcatraz has been out for a few months now. Is it some sort of recreation for you, compared to your epic fantasy works?
Yes, it is. I actually wrote Alcatraz between Mistborn books two and three. I had just finished book two, and I wanted to push in and do book three, but I was feeling a little exhausted, almost a little burnt out, and I didn’t want to start the final book feeling burnt out. And so, not telling anybody what I was doing, I took some time off, and I wanted to do something very different to encourage myself to grow as an artist, to explore different types of writing. Like I said normally I’m an architect, and I wanted to do a more gardener-type book. For Alcatraz I started with a few premises that I found amusing and interesting and I built a book out of them, as I went. It turned out very well—a lot of my projects that I experiment with, I actually don’t publish because they don’t turn out very well. I only take the ones that really turn out well and publish them.
So for every Alcatraz , there’s two or three other novels that just kind of nose-dived. That doesn’t happen with my epic fantasies because I spend so long planning them and getting them ready that I know, before I start, how they’re going to turn out.
But anyway, Alcatraz was a light-hearted, fun—but hopefully still interesting and intriguing—story for me to write, about a young man who discovers that librarians secretly rule the world!
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