Date: 2013-05-17
Type: Paraphrased
Location: Highlands Ranch, CO
Reporter: Kogiopsis
AND FINALLY: SIGNING RECAP
I’ve got two video recordings of Sanderson reading from the Words of Radiance draft—one on my camera, one on my iPod. I’m going to rip the audio from both and upload whichever has better sound quality tomorrow. It’s the same interlude that he read at a signing in New York, so if you’ve seen the transcription of that on Reddit, you’ve seen it—there might be a bit more to it, but not much?
Similarly, I have a video from the beginning of the Q&A that I can pull audio from as well—not the whole Q&A, because my iPod battery was about to die and so was my camera, but something like 8 minutes? I’ll listen to that tomorrow and determine if it’s worth uploading.
I asked five questions while he was signing my books; they are as follows, with answers as exact as I can remember them.
Is Renarin Kholin on the autism spectrum?
Slightly—not even so much as Asperger’s, but yes. (Something about it being difficult to notice/diagnose?)
What influenced the creation of the writing system in Warbreaker ?
He’d been writing a lot of kind of grungy books— Mistborn and Elantris are all sort of grimy—and his (editor? agent? one of the two?) pointed that out and suggested he write something colorful.
I think I didn’t phrase my question clearly enough. He answered with an explanation of the magic system’s origins instead, which is interesting but not what you wanted.
What would life on Nalthis be like for someone with synesthesia?
Synesthesia on Nalthis isn’t something he’s considered, but it would probably be about the same unless you had a lot of Breath, at which point things would get weird.
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia; from the Ancient Greek σύν syn, “together”, and αἴσθησις aisthēsis, “sensation”) is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.[1][2][3][4] People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.
How much control does he have over the Words of Radiance cover?
Some, by dint of being fairly well-known in the industry, but he’s really fond of Whelan’s work and more likely to pick a direction from concept sketches than push Whelan somewhere entirely new.
(I asked if he could, for instance, hold firm for epicanthic folds on Rosharan characters; he said probably yes, but most of Whelan’s cover work has been figures in the distance for now so that isn’t likely to be an issue. I didn’t feel comfortable asking the same question over again re: skin color.)
How long before the events of Elantris did Odium kill Aona/Devotion and Skai/Dominion?
Same time as the origins of the Seons.
This was the second-closest I came to getting RAFO’d. He was sort of jovially apologetic about this answer; I tried to get a solid number of years but to no avail.
Given that we now know that Odium can ‘make it possible’ for people to use magic that draws on him on other planets, has he done this anywhere besides Roshar?
Odium has been active on all other planets, including several we haven’t seen yet.
This one I nearly did get RAFO’d, and the answer is basically a non-answer.
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