Brandon Sanderson is a Guest of Honor for the World Fantasy Convention 2020
The forthcoming World Fantasy Convention 2020 has announced a slate of Guests of Honor which includes Brandon Sanderson, author of the Hugo award-winning THE EMPEROR’S SOUL. Joining Sanderson are David Cherry, Stephen Gallagher, Anne Groell, Cindy Pon, Stephen Graham Jones,Tracy and Laura Hickamn, and C. J. Cherryh. World Fantasy Convention 2020 takes place in Salt Lake City, UT on October 29-November 1.
On his personal site, Sanderson shared the deleted prologue to THE EMPEROR’S SOUL, “Imperial Fool.“
Shai pressed her fingernail into one of the stone blocks of her prison cell. The stone gave way slightly. She rubbed the dust between her fingers, frowning. “Limestone?” she asked softly. “Who makes a cell out of limestone?”
Read the rest at BrandonSanderson.com
Of course, the whole cell wasn’t of limestone, merely that single block. Shai had counted twenty-seven different kinds of stone so far, including several she didn’t know the names of. That would make escape tough. Very tough.
This was a cell that had been designed to hold a Forger. She knelt down beside her bunk, using a fork—she’d bent back all of the tines but one—to carve notes into the wood of one leg. She’d engraved a crosswork pattern on another side, with numbers representing the stones of the back wall of her cell. Without her spectacles, she had to squint to see what she’d carved there.
She wrote out, with some difficulty, the word limestone in the key representing the stone block she’d just identified. “Honestly,” she growled as she worked. “They sentence a girl to death. They could at least give her a sheet of paper.”
“A sheet of paper?” The amused voice came from outside the cell. “You actually asked for one?”
Susan Stradiotto, on their eponymous site, offers 5 Sources of Magic for Fiction Writing. The piece includes a discussion of “Sanderson’s Laws.”
While Sanderson’s laws provide a personal spin on magic in literature, I contend that they apply to a more advanced stage of developing the magic in your worldbuilding than the three questions listed above. Do note that Sanderson is considered an authority, and his laws are widely accepted among fantasy fiction writers However, even Mr. Sanderson states that they are derived from shared knowledge in his post here:
“I’ll start, however, by noting that none of these “laws” are absolute. Nor am I the only one to talk about them. By calling them “Sanderson’s Laws” I’m merely referring to them in the way I think of them–they are rules I try to live by when designing magic systems for my books.”
Source Article: Sandersons Second Law Update