Last time we spoke, we were talking about the 45-hour audiobook for The Way of Kings . Each of the Mistborn books came in at 25-30 hours, but The Alloy of Law comes in at a tidy 9 discs. Did you set out to write a shorter book?
I knew I wanted to do more in the Mistborn world, and for a long time I played with writing a short story. The short story that I tried to write didn’t work; I tossed it aside after maybe a thousand words, and began working on a different story. I can usually judge what the length of a story will be, and I knew this one would be longer, but I wasn’t sure how long I would want it to be, or whether I should make it a full-blown novel. So I wrote what turned out to be three or four chapters’ worth, and at that point I decided, it was a big enough story to can make a novel of it. I knew it wasn’t going to be the same length as the original Mistborn books, but I felt okay with that, because for a long time I’ve been wanting to start writing some—I don’t want to say shorter, but quicker, faster-paced stories; thrilleresque, maybe a little more pulpish. I just think of it as a fun book, that doesn’t require quite as much of an investment of time and energy for the reader as something like The Way of Kings —which I love, but I want to be doing a variety of things. So writing a shorter book was intentional, but I kind of slipped into it.
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