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Interview #846: BayCon 2012 - Galley Table Podcast with Brandon Sanderson, Entry #2

Phillip Carroll

But here are the questions that I asked my buddies to send in here. My daughter actually—I’ll ask her question first in case we run out of time—Waxillian? Why Waxillian?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, that’s a great question. The thing about Waxillian’s name is, a lot of people don’t like it. I actually love it, but that happens a lot in my books; I’ll do something I love that I kind of know other people are going to be annoyed by. The Wax books came, actually….as I was designing the books, I was figuring the characters, and the pun Wax and Wayne struck me, and I thought, “I can’t do that; that’s too lame a pun.” But the characters adopted those name before I could even do anything about it, and I actually tried changing the names, and it didn’t work. You know how sometimes, organically, it just happens, and you’re like, “I gotta go with this.” And so I didn’t want to actually just named them Wax and Wayne; I wanted Wax to be short for something, and it fits very well into the Mistborn universe, because all the characters tend to have nicknames that—you know, there was Clubs and Ham and Breeze in the last series—and I wanted a name that fit with that, and so Wax worked really well, but I wanted it to be short for something, and so I started looking at period names, things like William that worked and I actually ended up picking Waxillian because it also has a metallurgic sound and I figured names in this culture in the Mistborn world where metals are so important to the magic, you might have people named after metals; you might have names that sound like metals intentionally because of that resonance. At the end of the day I just really ended up liking it. It is a bizarre name.

Phillip Carroll

Thank you.

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