Brandon Sanderson begins work on the fifth Stormlight Archive book

Author Brandon Sanderson, whose works include Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, Skyward, and much more, has just posted his latest weekly update to his YouTube channel…and it’s a big one.

Aside from finishing Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time after Jordan passed away in 2007, Sanderson is perhaps best known for his own series of massively epic tomes, The Stormlight Archive, which tell the story of a fierce war between the Knights Radiant and the Parshendi in the world of Roshar. Beginning with The Way of Kings in 2010, these books have been pushing the bounds of what’s possible in a fantasy series, and Sanderson shows no signs of slowing down.

Sanderson is basically a writing machine, often putting out at least one new story every year across his many, many projects. This fall he’s publishing The Lost Metal, the fourth and final book of Mistborn’s Era Two. And now, he’s announced that he’ll also be returning to the world of The Stormlight Archive to work on the fifth book in the series.

Sanderson has started work on The Stormlight Archive #5

“I finished [Defiant, the final book of Skyward] on Wednesday of last week, which means I’m officially moving on to working on Stormlight five,” Sanderson said in his video update. “I actually wrote a few scenes for the prologue over the Christmas holiday, and I’m going to spend most of this month outlining. I won’t be doing a ton of new prose, most likely, just going over the outline, making sure everything works, talking to my team about it, all that sort of stuff.”

"It is exciting to write Gavilar’s prologue for that infamous scene that was the prologue of the first book that has been repeated now four times, and this will be the fifth time from a different viewpoint. I hope you guys will enjoy that. That’s going to be my job for the next eighteen months. In the meantime, in the evenings I’ll actually be doing revisions on other books. In this case I’ll probably be launching into Wax & Wayne 4’s revisions very soon."

Yes, Sanderson posted an update about not one, but two large fantasy books in the same video, and that’s not counting the news that he also finished Defiant, which wraps up his latest YA sci-fi series Skyward, as well.

Both Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are part of a shared universe that encompasses all of the author’s adult fantasy work, called the Cosmere, and at this point we’re starting to get some pretty interesting crossovers between series. The fifth book of The Stormlight Archive is an especially exciting one, because it will mark the end of the first arc of the long-running series. Sanderson has said that he has 10 books total planned for The Stormlight Archive, with a major conclusion happening in the fifth book. So it’s safe to expect that the novel he’s working on right now is going to bring a lot of stuff to a head, especially considering the massive cliffhangers that the previous novel, Rhythm of War, ended on.

For now, we wait. But with Sanderson, you know you’ll never be waiting long.

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