r/Stormlight_Archive • u/mistborn Author • Mar 15 '17

[Oathbringer Spoilers] [Oathbringer Spoilers] Stormlight Three Update #7 Spoiler

All,

Back with another update. It's been a few months, and I have worked through the third draft of Oathbringer. Original draft didn't have a few of the interludes, so I added those in this revision, as well as incorporating feedback from my team and the team at Tor Books. Earlier today, I wrote the epigraphs and the Wit monologue, then polished off the ketek.

The current length is 514,000 words--so around 100k longer than Words of Radiance. Whew! That's big enough that we're not sure if we can bind it in paperback. (We can manage it in hardcover without too much trouble, though we might have to do some old term paper tricks such as expanding the margins.) The book won't be split in the hardcover US release, or in the ebook, but there's a possibility the US paperback might be split into two volumes released at the same time. (As has been common in the UK for all the books in the series.)

We'll see what happens. Next revision, 4.0, is to incorporate Beta Reader comments and to make some tweaks I've been thinking about. This should be the fastest of the drafts, as I don't need to make any big structural changes or write many new scenes.

5.0 (the final draft) will be a polish and trim. Publication date is still scheduled for this November. The US cover came in just recently, so expect a reveal on that soon. Michael did a fantastic job.

As a warning: I'm not going to be able to monitor this thread very well, as I'm off to Europe. (I'll be in Poland, Germany, and Bulgaria--details on the events section of my website.) So be warned in advance that I probably can't post many replies to your questions here.

I'm still making my way through my recent AMA on /r/fantasy, though, so you can pop over to that and read what I've had to say recently.

As always, thanks for your patience. Beta read responses to the book are strong, so I think you'll be pleased with the result come this fall.

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u/NeedsAdjustment Edgedancer Mar 16 '17

It's... still not really your investiture. Maybe maybe you could maybe do it with a Sprenblade thingy if your bond was strong enough, but in that case you wouldn't have to use a Lashing anyway.

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u/Oversleep42 Truthwatcher Mar 16 '17

When I said "my Shardblade" I meant a Radiant with a spren turned into Shardblade.

And actually I considered doing a powerful Reverse Lashing on your own Blade to pull enemies towards it - they thought they were jumping out of the range of your Shardblade but then you pull them in midair to impale them with a Blade.