Recent entries

Questioner

How do you feel going back now and reading Traveler's Gate?

Will Wight

Terrible.  Thank you for asking.  I always feel bad reading my old stuff.  Just don't like it.  So when I read Traveler's Gate I am constantly just cringing and embarrassed.  But that's true when I read almost any of my old stuff.  So that's pretty normal.  

Questioner

Do you feel like you would have worked the series differently if you had all the experience you have now?

Will Wight

Yes.  Absolutely.  Even as I finished the Traveler's Gate trilogy I wanted to redo House of Blades.  I wanted to immediately go back and just rewrite the whole book.  But I didn't.  Because that's a, I don't think that's right.  Because if I did that, I could do that with any book.  Like, I could write it, then afterwards I'm a better writer.  Then I could write it again.  And even though it's kind of special because it's my first book, I didn't want to be rewriting House of Blades every five years.  I didn't want to be rewriting House of Blades every five years, so I just sort of didn't.

So, I think there is some really good ideas in Traveler's Gate, I'm emotionally attached to Traveler's Gate, but when I read it, and when I read it out loud for the audio books I was so embarrassed.  I'm just a better writer now.

Questioner

Have you ever thought about doing a Sci FI series, what would it look like?

Will Wight

No, I have not.  Here's why.  I believe every story is better with magic.  So if I did a sci-fi series, it would be a magic series set in space.  I've considered doing that.  Like I said early, I have considered doing magic terraforming.  That's basically a fantasy sci-fi.  So, if I did do a sci-fi series, it would look a lot like Red Rising.  And Pierce Brown already did that better than me.

Questioner

Have you ever been recognized out in the wild?

Will Wight

Yes.  So, one thing that happened, which was kind of funny, this is the first thing that pops into my mind; I have actually been recognized a few places, which is weird because I don't appear in person that often, so it's odd to be recognized.  Like, why did you know what I look like?  I guess because I do streams like this basically.  So, one particular story I had, this is not much of a story really, I was in a DnD group with a friend of mine, who invited a friend of his.  The friend of his asked what I did and said I was a writer.  And he asked what I write.  And I told him and he was like holy crap, I love that series.  So it was just Cradle, and it was neat.  So, that's the end of that story.  It wasn't super dramatic; it was just cool.  Because he had already read it.

There was another one; my dad was looking to hire somebody, and interviewed the guy, and the guys said he read a lot.  My dad said "What do you read?"  And he said "I read scifi/fantasy, and I am actually in the middle of a series now by a guy who has your last name."  Our last name is pretty unusual.  W-I-G-H-T.  And he said, "Oh really?  What series is that?"  And it was the Cradle series.  So that was pretty neat.  And of course he ended up hiring the guy, because obviously the dude has impeccable taste.

Chat

It's kind of weird how people recognize you since you're dead.

Will Wight

I'm not dead anymore.  I came back to life.  That's how I'm doing this stream.

Questioner

Would a mind/force path function like telekinesis?

Will Wight

Could be.  Yeah, you could do that.  But a force path sort of does that anyway.  

Questioner

If Kelsa had gotten the same opportunities as Lindon, would she have risen even more quickly?

Will Wight

No.  No she would not have.  So she, while being more talented, and a genuinely cool person, is not as resolved or determined as Lindon would be, and would not have set out to save Sacred Valley.  If she had that knowledge and the exact same opportunities that Lindon did she would have stayed in Sacred Valley and tried to persuade everyone else to leave.  So, that is how she would have solved that problem; she would not have gone out and advanced.  If she did do exactly what Lindon did, she would have stuck with the things he has stuck with and would have advanced differently.  And perhaps more efficiently, but it wouldn't have gotten her as far as Lindon has gotten.

Questioner

When Ziel showed Lindon the Tablet on pure madra in Ghostwater after lecturing him, was that always his intention, or was that only after Lindon explained he was advancing to protect his home from a great disaster?

Will Wight

I don't understand that question exactly.  When Ziel showed Lindon the table on pure madra in Ghostwater, was that always his intention?  I don't understand it.  I think the question means did Ziel intend to help Lindon, or was he persuaded to help Lindon when he heard that Lindon had a good cause.  And the answer is, he was persuaded by Lindon, finding out that he, starting to know Lindon as a person a little bit, and then when he did, he was like all right, I'll help you.  He did not intend to help at the beginning.  So I hope that answers your question.

Questioner

This was your longest book.  What results would inspire you to write even longer?

Will Wight

Even if this book completely slams all the results of my previous books, just destroys them and it sells more books than I have ever sold in my entire life, that probably would not change my length policy.  It probably wouldn't change it.  For instance, the book after Wintersteel, is almost certainly not going to be that long, because it's a more focused story.  It doesn't need to be.  So, Wintersteel doing really well would not change my mind on that.  That wouldn't be something that, that's not really the criteria I use to determine the length of the book.  But, the process of writing the book is going to be influenced by Wintersteel.  So if the response to Wintersteel is good, I'll use a similar process to write my future books.

Questioner

How powerful is a monarch butterfly?

Will Wight

It's a Monarch.

Questioner

Are you familiar with Attack on Titan? 

Will Wight

Yes.

Questioner

If so: the Blackflame Empire is suddenly invaded by the Titans, including the Colossal and Armored Titans. Assuming they can't call in backup, how well do they do?

Will Wight

Extremely well.  They just annihilate the Titans, the Titans have no chance to resist.  The Titan's run in fear.  The Titan's build walled cities against the Sacred Artists to keep them out.  The Titan's live everyday in fear that their loved ones will be destroyed by the people who can throw fire and eliminate matter.  Yeah, I feel the Titan's wouldn't be any threat to the Blackflame City at all, I feel like they would keep them as pets, that there would be no threat.  At all.

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.