The tentative but now fairly firm title is 'The Rhythm of War'. Didn't want to put that in the thread header in case Sanderson changes it.

The big news is that he thinks it'll be finished Christmas 2020, or if things don't go as planned, Spring 2021.

The 1st draft just hit the 50% mark yesterday (and given his work schedule and average writing speed, the Christmas 2020 is actually looking like a real possibility). The man is a machine.

P.S. Can I eat your dinner?

 

Journey before destination

 

It honestly feels like not that long ago that Oathbringer came out. I don't remember it as well as I'd expect, I think I'll have to go through at least book 3 again, if not all 3 before reading this.

 

The Coppermind website maintains meticulous chapter summaries for all the books. What I did for Oathbringer was summary for TWoK, then a WoR reread. This time around I'll do summaries for TWoK and WoR, and an Edgedancer/Oathbringer reread.

 

Is he going to do chapter releases like he did for oathbringer? What I did was read them as they came out then shortly before the book I reread them again and just started off from where they left off.

 

Publisher TOR announced today that the fourth book in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, which is as-yet unnamed, will be published on November 17th, 2020.

 

Wlel happy birthday to me.

Slow burn on the re-read from about August, I reckon.

 

Have you listened to the audiobooks? They're very good. I figure I'll start cycling through them around Oct 1.

 

Huh, earlier then I thought the next one would come out. Isn't the series supposed to be finished by like 2032-35?

 

Excellent. Here's hoping it's a return to form. Way of Kings was a 10/10 read for me, and Words of Radiance was not far behind, maybe a 9/10. Oathbringer was probably a 7/10. It took me 3 attempts across 2 years to finish it. First half was basically entirely logistics. A plot showed up in the second half, which was much more gripping, but the climax was basically a deus ex machina without any kind of meaningful foreshadowing. All the characters bar Dalinar became very annoying and the worldbuilding is devolving into an apocalyptic free-for-all. All of the twists were basically catching the characters up to what the reader already knew/had guessed, so were quite underwhelming.

My hope is that Oathbringer will be an outlier, a necessary transition piece. Like a massive example of one of those chapters which is necessary to get the pieces into place, but which is a real chore to write. But I have my doubts... I suspect my fundamental dislike of apocalyptic fiction is going to prevent me from enjoying the rest of the series as much as the early stages, back when there was still an interesting society within which the conflict occurred.

 

I'm glad you say that @Taure. I read Oathbringer once just after it came out. I was going through some shit and didn't concentrate on it that much, but I remember being seriously underwhelmed by it in comparison to the previous two. I also didn't really like Dalinar's backstory, even though I really enjoyed him as a char in the first two.

I've been lukewarm on the series ever since, but I do hope this one claws it back.

 

Huh. I thought Oathbringer was one of the better books of the series, myself. More Dalinar is always good and Alukar's character arc was really good, too. There were some parts that dragged one, but the climax was so worth it. My only disappointment was really Taravangian (spelling?) and some of his choices.

 

According to my Kindle I'm 53% into Oathbringer. Over 200k words and so far the only memorable bit of plot I can recall is Kaladin's group getting to Kholinar. Sanderson has a fundamental problem with bloating his wordcounts, but I guess expecting him to change that is like hoping GRRM will have Sanderson's writing speed.

Maybe I'll get through the remaining 47% in 11 months.

 

I also thought WoK was the best of them and WoR a close second, but my problem with OB wasn't Dalinar's back story (I actually really liked it), but the fact that the book seemed to have a really slogging ending. It was like The Godfather, you weren't sure where to clap.

The book's focus character and flashback character will be a combination of Venli and Eshonai. I'm honestly not sure how much I'm looking forward to that. The Singers have never been my favorite characters, especially Venli.

 

Wait, Book 4 will be about the interlude characters from WoR?

Right. Gonna be skipping half of Book 4.

 

I mean, books 1 and 3 also? This is the backstory.

 

All I remember is that there were interludes in WoR named "Eshonai" and I skipped them like all the rest of interludes. I have little interest in a whole book where this Eshonai is a main character with flashbacks like Kal in WoK, Shallan in WoR and Dalinar in OB. I get an early warning, I guess. Though I could probably skip every Eshonai chapter, present time or flashback, and still be left with 300k words because I imagine Stormlight 4 will bloat to over half a million even after edits.

 

Lol ok, but there was important plot in those. Your loss.

 

I looked on the coppermind wiki. Much quicker than slogging through that crap. I'll do the same for OB interludes.

I read a bit of OB today and reached two Shallan chapters where

Spoiler

she steals food in one chapter and gets an invitation from the Cult of Moments in the next chapter. What I don't understamd is why Shallan couldn't go from meeting with Wit straight to infiltrating the feast of the Cult? Were the chapters about stealing food and getting an invitation crucial to the plot?

 

Crucial? No. Plot-relevant, yes.