Recent entries

Questioner

Will Lindon and Orthos ever fuse to become the Path of Twin Turtles?

Will Wight

Yes. 100 percent that's gonna happen. Spoiler alert.

Questioner

Would you recommend eating alligator?

Will Wight

Yes I would. Fried gator tail is delicious. What I would not recommend is going out and eating an alligator. Like if you were to go out there and find an alligator and just try to eat it, I would not recommend that. You would not have a good time, don't do that. But alligator as a meat? Absolutely.

Somebody mentioned One Punch Man, and I've gotta say, if you're not reading One Punch Man you should be reading One Punch Man. The manga coming out right now, it's spicy it's good stuff. There was a lot of stuff in that where I was like "That's good writing." Cause they set it up, they did it, they built the characters, they had payoff, they were aiming for an emotional catharsis and they're doing some good stuff right now.

Questioner

Who would be the best cook out of all the Dreadgods?

Will Wight

The Silent King would absolutely be the best cook. First of all he's the most intelligent of them, the most sentient. He absorbs the thoughts of others so he's probably absorbed the skills of thousands if not millions of people who were really good at cooking, so he's probably an extremely experienced chef secondhand. Plus he's got razor sharp talons he can use to mince ingredients really quickly. And he's got an army of servants who are mind controlled to prep things for him. I suspect that the Silent King could really prepare a great meal. That was my passionate and enthusiastic response to who would be the best cook among the Dreadgods.

Questioner

Which Dreadgod would make the best pet?

Will Wight

I would not recommend any of them. You're barking up the wrong tree.

Questioner

Who would you say was or is the most powerful Herald on Cradle?

Will Wight

I don't know. I actually don't know how to answer that.

Steve Farmer

I'm very curious about your writing process. How different was the first draft of Unsouled from it's final form?

Will Wight

Funny story about that, Steve. You picked an interesting example because I was intending Unsouled to be released on my blog for free as a series of chapters because I was going "Hey? You know what, I'll just try and do a web serial as my side thing in order to keep people reading the blog and keep people remembering that I am a person that exists while I write the next set of Elder Empire books." But then I rolled out all the short stories over the mailing list, which we used to do, and that got people engaged and I was like "Oh, okay, well I don't need to do that with this but now I have a book, so let's finish it out and put it up and then we'll know what we know how to do and release it on the Kindle store and then maybe that will keep people engaged." And then that got way more engagement than Elder Empire ever did, so I was like "Uh-oh." And then I wrote Soulsmith.

So Unsouled's first draft and it's final form were not very different. Most of my first drafts are really pretty clean in general. Not universally, but in general I write pretty clean first drafts. The final drafts I don't change a whole lot, but what I do change has a lot of impact. It's not like I go through and make a million major changes so the story's completely different. What I do is, it turns out there's a lot of things you can change with just a word or a sentence here and there. Generally if you read my alpha draft and you read my published draft you would be able to see easily where I went from one to the other but they will read very differently. 

Jeremy the Other One

Who's your favorite character to write the persepctive of?

Will Wight

Bliss, from Elder Empire. She's really fun. Pure fun, just enjoyable.

From Cradle, it is Eithan, hands down. It is easy and he gets to do whatever he wants.

Michael Redman

If you had to choose a path, which path would you choose?

The answer I've given to this before, there's a couple of them. Path of the Cloud Hammer from the Blackflame empire, I would love to have that. I think Cloud/Force madra seems really cool. It lets you, like, double jump and fly around on clouds like Dragon Ball era Goku. Telekinesis type abilities, I think that's neat. Oh right, Path of the Broken Star, which I've talked about before. It was one of the paths that Lindon could have chosen in Blackflame. It's neat, it's basically like purple energy beams.

Questioner

When is Willcon year 2?

Will Wight

Willcon year 2 is this year at Dragoncon just like it was last year. We're going to do another event that is informally called Willcon-I did not call it that and we're not officially calling it that for sure. We're going to do a fan get together at Dragoncon this year. If you're in Atlanta around Dragoncon check us out. The Saturday of Dragoncon, Sam says, I didn't know that.

Questioner

If Cradle was a movie, what song would you want to play during the opening credits?

Will Wight

Danger Zone.

Questioner

What sort of an Army from Cradle would it take to conquer our world?

Will Wight

One Herald. One Herald because anything we could do to him he would be immune to. He would be able to affect large swaths of terrain at the same time. You couldn't nuke him, you couldn't do anything. There's no amount of physical force that would work. He can affect us, we can't affect him, that's it.

Questioner

Will we ever see Fury again?

Questioner

Will we ever see Fury again?

Will Wight

Yes we will. We absolutely will. I will now back out because I see there are people asking me questions to elaborate on that.

Will Wight

Yes we will. We absolutely will. I will now back out because I see there are people asking me questions to elaborate on that.

AJ

How often in real life do you see something that you can hear how one of your characters would react to it?

Will Wight

This is why Dross and Eithan are the easiest characters to write. I could come up with Dross or Eithan reactions to almost literally anything, and then Lindon too I just know the character well enough to be able to do that. Yerin I could do, I would have to work on the phrasing, I couldn't just pin that off. When I know the characters well I can think of that. I don't hear it unless something triggers it specifically. If we're talking about something that the character, you know, it's a meme. So like there's a bunch of rocks sitting around and I'd be like "Mmm, Orthos would love munching on those." kind of thing. Unless there's a trigger for it, I don't sit there and have Eithan whispering in my ear. That's a bad example cause he does whisper in my ear, all the time.

Gavin

Are the characters voices always Travis Baldree in your head?

Will Wight

You have asked a wise question. I go back and forth, of course I had character voices in my head before Travis read them. When I did my reread of Cradle, I listened to the audiobooks primarily so that I could kind of adjust my mental voices to not exactly match Travis's but be informed by them. Now what it sounds like in my head is like the old characters have taken on some of the mannerisms of the Travis Baldree versions so that now they're a little more compatible. The characters have grown and adapted in my brain.

Ken Worthington

Eithan can only whisper in your ear because your hair lacks volume and definition.

Will Wight

You are absolutely correct. That is why I do not hear the voice of Eithan more clearly, it is because my hair game is weak, and that's why I wear these hats, so it's all connected. This is all a hair conspiracy.

Questioner

It seems like Dreadgods and Dreadbeasts have their spirits fused with their flesh comparative to heralds.

Will Wight

That's a question that gets asked a lot, Dreadgods and Dreadbeasts have their spirits fused with their flesh, Heralds do too, what's the difference? Difference is, Heralds do it correctly, they do it when their bodies and spirits can handle it, and Dreadbeasts do it when their bodies and spirits can't handle it. The Dreadgods are what happens when that is taken to absurd ridiculous extremes, then they mutated into something else entirely and became an exception to the rule.

Questioner

How many people have the points icon?

Will Wight

That one is rare, it's only one. Lindon is the only one to have manifested the points icon. I said earlier there weren't any rare icons but that is one of them.

Questioner

What's up with the number 8?

Will Wight

That's a good question, I'm glad somebody dared to ask it, but I can't answer it on stream for fear of getting in trouble. Big eight industry is gonna get me.

Questioner

How do you go about imagining and developing personalities? Did you draw inspiration from people in your life?

Will Wight

People ask me this often, if a particular character was inspired by someone, and the answer is no. I've never developed characters like that. I mean I take aspects of people and I usually use their expressions in a certain way. A lot of people have noted that Fury is like Goku-yeah, he definitely is. But its really more like how do I express this guy who loves fighting all the time and is kind of tied into the Akura family so I always think "okay, what character expresses themselves that way? You know what, he's got a real Goku vibe going on." so I just lean into that. That was something that kind of naturally came from who the character needed to be. So I develop personalities by giving characters traits that I think would fit them and suit who they are and then kind of baking them into their personalities and going "Okay, why do they have these traits? What kind of person would make these decisions?" and then I figure out a way to get them to express those traits. The only way in which people's real personalities influence that is that I observe people's real personalities and how they exhibit those traits.

I can actually give you a little bit of an example, it's not super specific because you don't know the people I'm talking about. I was working with a friend of mine recently who was working on his first book and I said that I would take examples of people's personalities and their dialogue traits and I would write dialogue like that in order to go "Pay attention to how real people talk and what that says about who they are and where they came from." He said "Well can you give me some examples?" So I went over our friends in our friend group and I said "This person has this turn of phrase, this person has this turn of phrase, I have this turn of phrase, I speak like this, and you speak like that." I really wish I could be specific about this but you don't know the people I'm talking about so it wouldn't make any sense to you. He heard that and went "Oh wow, you're absolutely right, what you're saying makes so much sense, I just had never thought about it like that, as being a unique dialogue trait to them." And I said "Yeah, because I think of people basically as fantasy novel characters." No, I'm just kidding. I said "no, when you write characters you should be thinking of them as real people and real people when they have certain traits exhibit them in their behavior, so you should be paying attention to how people do that."

Everyone is a character waiting to be killed off in my novel.

Questioner

Will Dross be back for real in Dreadgod?

Will Wight

Could be. maybe this current Dross is the Dross you're going to get forever. I actually have some more versions of Dross that I'm happy to try out. One of them is country farmer Dross, he's got a straw hat and little tiny overalls on his little round body, he's chewing on a piece of wheat. I'm excited for you to meet him.

Byron

Sexy Dross?

Will Wight

I actually wrote Sexy Dross into Reaper and my readers agreed it was way to spicy to ever see the light of day so we've hidden that from you. It is content you would certainly love, but we had to keep it hidden away in the vaults to be released in case of emergency.