The Alloy of Law has the feel of a Western with just a dash of Steampunk. Did you do a lot research into Westerns to try and figure out how one could fit into your world or was it more of an organic process?
I’d say more organic. I honestly don’t look at it as much of a Western. The part that is in a Western setting, the prologue, is actually the last thing I wrote, feeling I needed a better introduction. Originally the story just started in the city.
As I said, I view it as a clash between these two concepts, the city and the frontier. Mistborn as a series has always been city-based, urban. I intend to keep it that way, mostly. The story here as I saw it was of the man who had been living out on the frontier for a long time who comes back and has to integrate into society. Which is another theme of the Mistborn books—just as in the original trilogy Vin had to go from the streets to upper society, I wondered what it would be like to deal with a character who had lived among the two-faced society of city politics and more or less rejected it, who gets pulled back against his will. So I would say it’s less a Western and more a clash between that more simple, rugged lifestyle and the city lifestyle.
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