Recent entries

Questioner

As someone progresses as a Traveller of Valinhall, does the "quality" of their steel ever increase, and with it the strength, or does it remain the same as the day they earned it?

Will Wight

You're able I guess, to channel more of it as you go on, so you draw more of the steel, as Simon demonstrates in the books.  So you can channel more of it, and you can also control the amount you draw a little more, but no, what the steel actually does remains constant.  So you don't upgrade to better steel or whatever.

Questioner

Who or what was your inspiration for our lord and savior Orthos?

Will Wight

All right.  So, this goes a little deeper into what I was saying before about the original draft of Cradle.  So don't read too much into what I'm about to say, because this is long ago, in a story far, far, away.  So this bears little resemblance to current Cradle.

(Will builds a hut.  He implores us not to judge his hut.)

So, back in the day, the version of the main character of this was someone who was going to have both void powers and Abidan powers; they were going to have chaos powers and order powers.

(A cow wanders by.  Will is briefly intimidated by the cow, but soon realizes the coexistence is possible and lets the cow be.)

And they were going to have an animal companion/contractee/whatever, as their, as representatives or contractors or whatever for each of those powers.  And so the dragon was going to represent the chaos/destruction powers, and the water fairy that ended up turning into Little Blue was going to represent the order powers.  So, I had the image of a dragon named Oerthon, and originally the dragon turned into a sword, and the sword was a yellow sword that was hooked and made of bone, yellow bone, and the handle was like black leather, and the dragon would turn into this weapon, and the fairy would turn into a silvery blue spear.  So there were a number of things then that ended up getting in the way of that, but that was the original plan.  So it was dragon, a black dragon named Oerthon.  And he wasn't super big, yeah, I know, that was one of things that got, someone said "Thanks Brandon," yeah that was one of the things that was written that got in the way of this, because this was a long time ago.  This started in 2005, 2006, 2007, so this was years before Stormlight Archive, and spoiler alert, that happens in Stormlight Archive.  So this all ended up completely abandoning those plans once that happened.  So that was rough for me.  But it was ok.  I had mostly abandoned that track anyway by that point.

(Will again implores we not judge his building skills, this time regarding his roof.)

So, that was Oerthon, the black dragon.  So, when I got into actually writing Cradle, I had to come up with an animal companion for Lindon that would give him his contracted Blackflame powers.  And, you know, by default it was going to be a dragon, but it's like, you expect it to be a dragon.  So I was thinking what would be a different animal?  Basically anything but a dragon.  So we were going through, and we were thinking, I was talking to my friend, and we were just brainstorming animals.  We were just going, OK, what other animal could it be?  So we ended up, he suggested turtle.  And he was like, what about a turtle?  And I was like, yeah, I thought of a turtle, but it's like, I don't know.  It felt a little too memey.  It's a little too much like OK, you picked the funny animal.  And I was like, eh, I don't know.  I don't know how I feel about a turtle.  So we through it, and we kept coming back to turtle.  And we kept coming back to turtle because I just liked it, and he liked it, and we both liked it, and of course as we were thinking about it, a dragon-turtle is like a thing.  We didn't make that up.  That's a mythical existence in the genre we're writing in.  So, we were just immediately like, it's got to be a dragon-turtle.  It's got to happen.

Questioner

Are we gonna see more magic systems from other Iterations?

Will Wight

At some point, either in Cradle, the next few books, or in my next series when I write something with a different magic system. 

Questioner

Are Abidan presence personalities specialized for their job? For example, Suriel's is robotic to balance her empathy with utilitarian calculations during triage.

Will Wight

Yes, so Abidan Presence's personalities are absolutely specialized for their jobs. Their personalities are kind of, in Suriel's case, her robotic presence is a choice on her part, she has made it have less of a personality.

Questioner

How disappointed are you that Nintendo inadvertently created Bowsette before you could reveal what form Orthos would take?

Will Wight

This is a common misconception. People think that I intended for Orthos to become a female character and become one of Lindon's love interests. This is actually not true. I still have and always from the beginning intended Orthos's daughter to become Lindon's love interest and she was going to wear a crown and therefore take on the appearance of Princess Peach. Until Nintendo did that and I had to scrap it, oh well.

Questioner

Which rank would a Traveler's Gate Incarnation be on Cradle?

Will Wight

That depends on which Incarnation it is. The Valinhall Incarnation is Underlord/Overlord, but it's all physical powers and such. An actual Underlord or Overlord would be a lot more flexible and be able to do a lot more things. 

Questioner

Forgive this one if this question was already answered in the books, but what was the price for Talos' sword in the Traveler's Gate Trilogy?

Will Wight

I do not remember at all. I have no clue. So I'm going to go ahead and say 50 dollars. 

Questioner

At what level is a gun useless, Truegold or Highgold?

Will Wight

A gun would be useful against any -well not any Gold, because some Golds could just be immune to that. But a gun would be useful at Gold level.

Questioner

I feel like I've lost my characters voices in the middle of writing my book, should I start over, try something new, or push through?

Will Wight

Always, the answer to that question is push through. Always push through to the end of the book. What you need to do is get to the end of the book. You don't know what book you're writing until you finish it. So, you've got to get to the end of the book and then you've got a story to work with. Until you finish the book you don't know if your voices really are inconsistent. Maybe they're not, maybe you just feel that way. Maybe you don't feel like you can write your characters anymore, but you actually are.  You don't know that. Finish the draft, always, always always, finish the draft. 

Questioner

You can choose any object we have seen in any book you have written to bring into the real world. What object do you choose?

Will Wight

Ok, let's see.  Any object I have written.  I don't know.  So, my criteria for answering that question is I would think of something that I would think that if I brought it in the real world, it would make the world more magical.  It would give the world magic powers. So it depends on how it happens.  I just want the world to be cooler.  So I would look for an object in the books that would let me, oh, that's the answer.  That's actually it.  So it would be a world seed.  Which what a world seed is, which I of course didn't go into detail in Uncrowned, but what seed is, is it is effectively, I mean, it's literally that.  It's the seed of an Iteration.  But more than that, it is an Iteration, it's leftover material from the creation of the original Iterations.  So it can be used to do almost anything.  So it's effectively like a blank check for modifying reality.  Except when you use, you are kind of creating a new, you are overwriting your current reality, like your writing a new effect onto reality.  So you can't just be like "Ah! Now everybody in Cradle likes me."  It doesn't work that way.  But you can change some of the fundamental rules of reality, so I could make a world or add a magic system.  So that would be neat.  The exact mechanics of how that works, will of course be forthcoming in a published work.

(Hat switch!)

Will Wight

Which character in Cradle has been the most difficult to write?

Questioner

Most difficult.  Hmm. (RoR2 discussion.  Will is optimistic that he can repeat his previous actions which lead to death, except this time there will be no death.)  Which character in Cradle is the most difficult to write?  I don't know.  That's a hard question to answer.  I guess Yerin, because she's in so much of the books, and her dialogue requires extra attention, and she also has an emotional journey that parallels Lindon's, so there fore it's hard to keep writing her, and that's not really... I don't know that's the spirit of the question.  So, she's not that hard, because I know the character well and I've been writing her for a long time.  I don't know. 

I don't who is the most difficult; I know the most difficult thing for me to write, and that is anything where the characters are expressing genuine emotion.  Any genuine scenes where the characters are emotionally interacting and they are really having these heart to heart moments.  It's very difficult because it requires a lot more thought and focus and design and knowledge of the characters.  It's got to come across as organic and things the characters would actually say, and you are also trying to evoke some kind of emotion in the reader.  Now, it's not always the emotion that the character is experiencing.  You are not always truing to get the reader to feel sad if the character is feeling sad.  But you are always trying to make it feel like the characters genuinely do feel sad which is difficult.  So that is the hardest thing to write.

Questioner

If Urg'naut was set loose on a dying Iteration, would he be able to destroy it as thoroughly as Ozriel?

Will Wight

Probably, yeah. If he was put into an Iteration that was dying, would be be able to just obliterate everything, yeah probably. That would be within his powers. But the problem is, you can't control him, so you couldn't even consistently get him to do that. So even if you could move him around and put him in different Iterations, what he would be doing is constantly working toward a goal, eliminating the Abidan and their organisation and other living Iterations. He also is less interested in destroying already dying Iterations, because they're already dying, they're good, he approves, they're on their way! So that would be the difference.

Questioner

Are there any times Lindon or Yerin surprised you?

Will Wight

Characters don't surprise me, how do I put this, this is a hard thing to explain, but there's a generally common saying that characters have done something on their own, or they've run off and they've surprised you, or oh man the characters did something I didn't expect. I don't really understand that, because I made up the characters, they do what I tell them to.

What I do understand is that the better I get to know them the more they do something that I didn't necessarily plot out ahead of time, and that's what people mean, so I do understand that experience. But what they never do is they never do something that is completely out of line with the story I'm telling, they never surprise me in that way, so they always stay within certain bounds.

So it's just that I get to know the characters really well, and they grow and change and my understanding of them grows and changes and I get very familiar with them. So they change and they do things that I can now predict that maybe i didn't think about ahead of time.

Will Wight

So, some people are asking me about Anagi, I don't know how much I can tell you, I will say we will get some details about that in Wintersteel, but not as many as I'd originally planned. I didn't cut much from Wintersteel. Some of the few things I cut in this book were scenes that were extra background scenes for the villains, or opponents, they're not all villains, but the other people in the Uncrowned tournament. Some of the stuff I cut was backstory for Yan Shoumei. So we had a whole thing with her where we learned about her backstory, we learned about where she came from, we learned about her rivalry with this person named Anagi and who they are and who raised her, all that stuff. Most of that got removed, it wasn't really necessary to the forward progress of the story. It fleshed her out a little bit, but she really didn't need to be fleshed out, but it was fun to write.

Questioner

How did you design Dross?

Will Wight

hmm, so the first thing I did, was i started from what is a primarily mechanical construct, with like a ghost inside it. So I went through Dross' evolution, and I started off that way, and then I thought ok, how do I show Dross' improvement in a certain area, every time he gets improved? So every time I had him become more complex, and then more organic, and then more solid, and I had to do that every time he advanced in his development in Ghostwater. So as I did that, he sort of took shape, 'cos i had to think every time, what's the next step? So I didn't really start off with an image of him as like a purple tentacled Mike Wazowski, but that's kinda what he became, and i'm happy with it, I liked it.

Questioner

Is storm madra an aspect of wind madra?

Will Wight

Storm is just kinda what they call lightning aura. It's just lightning. So there are storm paths, thats aren't necessarily completely lightning aura. They're also wind, and maybe force, or water. So Tiberian Aurelius followed a storm path in the sense that it was mostly lightning, but he also had aura aspects from a lot of other things that you would find in storms. So storm path and storm aura are often used differently, and i know that's confusing and weird, but there are cultures on Cradle that I didn't think it was organic for them to just call it lightning or electricity. I thought it would be more poetic or they would probably say storm.

Questioner

Will the Song of Fallen Ash ever make another appearance?

Will Wight

Maybe, i dunno. I tend to make up those techniques as they're needed in those cases, like I just make em up in batches and just think of a bunch of cool names. Then often after I do that, I then make up what they actually are, so I will at times design entire paths around just a cool word or name I made up, or a cool technique or whatever, and that is one of them, where I sort of outlined the path roughly just because I thought the name was cool. So yeah, we might see more of it. I'm not sure exactly in what context we would, but yeah, maybe.

Questioner

What would be the result if Little Blue and Dross did a fusion dance?

Will Wight

Impossible, and here's why. Dross can't do a fusion dance, because Dross doesn't have fingers. He therefore can't extend his fingers at the proper angle in order to execute a proper fusion dance so....can't happen. Couldn't wear the potara earrings either, because he doesn't have ears so...we're out of luck really.

Questioner

Is there a salt territory and Will incarnated?

Will Wight

Yes.

Will Wight

All the Lord revelations are meant to steadily point you toward Sage.