Brandon Sanderson is—as ever—a busy man. There was his massively successful Kickstarter, earlier this year, which will put four secret project books straight into the hands of fans. There’s the new Mistborn book, The Lost Metal, which comes out in November. And there’s the little matter of the hotly anticipated fifth Stormlight Archive book—which, as it turns out, you’re going to have to wait a little longer for.
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The Lost Metal
Sanderson shared an update on Reddit yesterday, saying, “I wanted to wait until I’d made good progress this month before I stopped to write one of these updates, and I do apologize for leaving you in the dark for so long.” He’s been busy with meetings, with planning the secret project books, and with all kinds of side projects, like Stormlight miniatures, and with “the numerous film and television meetings that have been happening lately.” (Announcements, he says, can be expected “in the near future.”)
But the primary point of his post is to say that the next Stormlight novel will likely not come out until fall of 2024. He lists three reasons for the delay: the aforementioned meetings; a “TON of revisions”; and the care required for this volume, which will conclude the first half of this epic series:
The second reason I pushed the book back is that I knew this book, of all the ones in the sequence, deserved a little extra time and attention. It will likely be the longest of the series to date, and I have to be careful to juggle all the storylines properly. I didn’t want to be rushed on it, and—though it may shock you—an 18-month production cycle wasn’t going to cut it.
There are some small teasers in the original post as to how he’s writing the book, and which character’s backstory he’ll be digging into. There’s also some new art of a scene from the forthcoming book!
As for what’s up next: “My intention is that once this is done, we’ll have another longer-than-normal gap as I turn my attention to Mistborn Era Three (and hopefully the Elantris sequels) before diving back in to do the back five Stormlight books. From there, I’m hoping to return to a 3-year gap between books until we push to the ending at book ten.”
