highladyluck:

cozcat:

you know what continues to make me so happy about the wheel of time tumblr fandom

everybody not only tolerates the changes in adaptation, but wholeheartedly embraces them, and has a list of things they want to change, many of which seem like safe possibilities with changes made so far

it’s very zen and very fun to be embracing not only what the story is, but what the story has the potential to be, and what it doesn’t need to be any more

I’ve been a fan for… possibly 15, 20 years? And the longer I spend really thinking about WoT the more I’m just like ‘oooh what if you put the bits together differently? what would be revealed about the story and the characters? what would be obscured? what could we do better, this time around? what is the most efficient, or most fun, or most compelling way to get across this theme or get from point a to point b? What does translation mean, across time and medium?’

And it’s funny, those are some of the questions that I think the books ask us to consider in the first place- why else are there so many alternate universes, or times when characters grapple bodily with their destinies, or realize they can make different choices or get stuck in the same bad choices again and again? Like, how could you miss the themes of information being changed and lost and questioned across time and distance and culture? The Wheel weaves on!

Kimmalyn

LadyLameness:There’s a scene in ReDawn that has overtones of Kimmalyn being gay - is Kimmalyn canonically queer?

Brandon Sanderson: Yes. Might be bi, we are exploring it as we go. 

The Apocalypse Guard
Part One: The Plural of Apocalypse

Chapter One:

Emma’s Instructions for Starting a Book:

1) Start with something exciting, to get the reader’s attention.

2) Don’t start with a blog post. Like this one.

3) Crap. Let me start over.

Smoke in the air, a red sky, huddling alone in the ruins of a dying world. (See, that’s better already.) My name is Emma, by the way. Yes, that Emma, from Emma’s Instructions. But unless you’re one of the six people who follows me on Snapgram, that probably doesn’t mean anything to you. So, let me introduce myself. I’m eighteen years old. I’m from <Idaho>, sort of. And I just realized that I got totally off track again. What happened to the red sky and the dying world? Well, let me tell you.

Remember how I’m only sort of from <Idaho>? I’ve lived there since I was two, but I was born in a place called <Ard>, which is basically like a different version of <Idaho>, but in an alternate reality? And if you’re reading this, you need to know about alternate realities. There’s Earth. And then there’s an infinite number of different worlds that are kind of like Earth, but also different. Sometimes a little, and sometimes a lot. Like there’s one called <Hona> that’s mostly the same as the world you know, except instead of continents it’s all islands. Even <Idaho> is an island in a giant North American archipelago. Crazy, huh? So there’s <Hona>, and there’s Terra, and there’s <Erodan> and <Pangaea>, and a bunch of others. And there used to be an <Ard>, but it’s gone now. Because I called it a dying world before, but that was sixteen years ago. Today, it is all the way dead. Burned to a crisp. And I almost burned with it, except that the Apocalypse Guard swooped in and saved me.

Holy crap, the Apocalypse Guard! Why didn’t I start with them?

Emma’s Instructions for Starting a Book Correctly:

1) Start with something exciting to get the reader’s attention.

2) Like, for example, if your story includes a group of amazing heroes who travel the multiverse saving entire worlds from destruction, maybe lead with that.

3) I mean, come on.

The Apocalypse Guard are based on Earth, but they hop around from world to world stopping Apocalypses. Apocalypsi? Apocaleeps? That word doesn’t even have a plural, because why would you ever need to talk about more than one Apocalypse? Most people just get one, and then boom, you’re done. That’s what an Apocalypse is. But the Apocalypse Guard can actually stop Apocalypses, and they’ve already stopped a bunch of them and now we’re in <Erodan> to stop a giant asteroid and it’s AMAZING.

Important Note: did you see how I casually dropped that “we” in there? Now “we’re” in <Erodan>? That’s because I’M TOTALLY A MEMBER OF THE APOCALYPSE GUARD AND I CAME HERE TO STOP AN ASTEROID! (I know it’s kind of lame to type in caps lock like that, but seriously, if you were in the Apocalypse Guard traveling to a different dimension to stop a giant asteroid, you’d totally put it in your Snapgram, too, and I would not say anything about your excited over-use of caps lock because I am a good friend.

Which is also why I am going to stop talking about myself and start telling you the story about how we saved <Erodan>.

Starting right now.

I was standing in the Apocalypse Guard command center, looking up at the screens that showed the giant asteroid hurtling down toward the planet when Commander Visco signalled that it was time for me to do my part.

“Emma,” she said, and waved her coffee mug toward me. “I’m empty again.”

Okay, so my part is very small.

“Yes, sir!” I seized the Commander’s mug and hurried over to the small kitchen beside the command center. I mean, I was only eighteen, and fresh out of high school; it’s not like I was gonna be out there flying around in a power rig, draining kinetic energy from an extinction-level space rock. I was a cadet! And this was still very early in my training, so coffee was all they let me do.

One pot of coffee was already brewing on the counter, but we had about forty people in the command center, each with their own station and responsibility. So I got a second pot going, just in case. To tell you the truth, I was a coffee-making genius. Which is weird, because I don’t drink coffee. I’m not just from <Idaho>; I’m from <Iona, Idaho>. Population 1,803, approximately 1,802 of whom are in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, including me. So I don’t drink coffee, but you know what I can do? I can follow instructions. It’s practically a superpower. Though, I guess if you followed me on Snapgram, you already knew that.

Emma’s Instructions for Perfect Coffee:

1) Follow the freaking recipe.

2) Serve it way hotter than you think it should be.

3) Never talk about how bad it smells.

I know a lot of people love the smell of coffee, but they’re wrong. You call it an acquired taste; I call it Stockholm Syndrome.

“You don’t have to read the recipe every single time you brew a pot,” said Sophie, jogging up with a few empty mugs of her own. She was a cadet, like me, and was mostly just a coffee girl, like me. “Trust me,” she said, “I’ve been drinking coffee for years and I…”

She caught a whiff of the pot I had just filled, and her eyes closed in aromatic pleasure. “Wow, that smells amazing!”

“Thank you,” I said and smiled. What did I tell you? Coffee. Making. Genius. When you read the manual and follow the rules and measure things exactly, it will always turn out better than if you just do something by instinct. Always.

I gave Sophie a fist-bump of cadet solidarity, filled Commander Visco’s mug, and rushed back into the command center. I said before that we were on <Erodan>, but that’s “we” in the communal sense. We, the Apocalypse Guard, had a presence in <Erodan>. When most think of the Apocalypse Guard, they think of the Power Riggers, and their fantastical abilities. And yes, a bunch of those people were on <Erodan> and up in orbit around it, fighting the asteroid. The rest of us, the operators, scientists, engineers, medics, Commanders, janitors, accountants, and cadets were back on Earth using something called a dimensional tunneler to communicate with the Riggers.

We were doing it from an orbital space station, though, which is still pretty friggin’ rad, huh? I love this job.

I gave Commander Visco her steaming mug of coffee and took the opportunity to look over her shoulder at the room’s main screen, currently showing a view of the asteroid. One of our technicians had named the asteroid “Droppy.” Which was why we didn’t usually let our technicians name things.