Warbreaker and A Memory of Light General Updates

Brian Sanderson Blog entry Posted on 06.23.08


Folks! I'm hard at work this week on a Warbreaker revision. It's a fact of the business that you often have to stop what you're working on to do something else, and in this case, we need to have Warbreaker ready to go by the end of July. That means that I'll be getting only a little bit done on AMoL, but I will probably have yet another draft of Warbreaker ready for download in a short while. This will probably be the last one for download, as all changes after this will be done on hard copy and not the computer.

And, as for AMoL, I've been looking through what we have done and I'm very pleased with it. There will need to be edits done, of course, but I'm very excited at how this project is going. I'm still on target to get it done by the end of the year, I hope, but as I've warned before...this book is going to be LONG. I'm hoping to keep it to between 400k and 500k words in length, but I worry that it might stretch longer. We shall see. As everyone knows, there is a lot to tie up, and the more I work on it the more I realize that I can't place a hardfast limit on its length. It could end up at 350k,it could end up at 600k. Whatever it takes to write this story the way Mr. Jordan would have wanted it.

Mr. Jordan promised that this would be one book, even if Tor had to invent a new binding method to print it! Well, I intend to write it as one book. However, I do want people to be aware that I have no power over whether or not this thing gets cut into two volumes after I've finished it. That will be up to the publisher and Harriet. It's really too early to tell if a cut will be considered or not. (And to be honest, I think it's unlikely that the book will need to be cut.) But I do think readers should be aware of the possibility. (Part of the reason Tor could end up having to cut it would have to do with bookstore pressures. They're already very upset with Tor at the length of its books, as they take up a lot of shelf space at the store and earn less money per inch for the booksellers than books in other genres.)

Anyway, my job is to write the book at the length it needs to be to make the best book possible, whatever that length may be. We'll let Harriet and Tor decide how to present the final product! Keep an eye on the blog for future updates, as I'll know more about length once I've finished a few of the other sections.

(Also, know that if Tor does decide to cut the book, I will lobby heavily for a couple of things. First, a special collector's edition with both books in one that can be ordered by the hardcore readers who want one volume. Second, to have both volumes released in stores around the same time, rather than waiting years between.)