Meeting Brandon Sanderson

As I write this, I’m sitting in Paddington Station, London. Pretty much every train has been cancelled and I’m going to be at least two or three hours late home. But you know what? It’s okay, because today I met Brandon Sanderson.

I can see people around be getting increasingly agitated due to the stopped trains, but I’m taking time to reflect on my meeting with Brandon and looking over the video that I managed to capture. It was a meeting setup by the ever accommodating Jon Weir of Gollancz (Brandon’s UK publisher) and one that is a pretty big deal for Fantasy-Faction and our fans.

Anyway, back three or four hours and I was just arriving at Orion House in London. It was a huge building and I was surrounded by books – hundreds and thousands of books – many of which are not due for release for months yet. Of course, I did you proud and took about 10 home with me. So expect some cool, advanced reviews in the near future!

I saw Brandon wrapping up an interview and after finally meeting Jon Weir who had arranged interviews and sent books to me before, I was led in to meet Brandon. The first thing that struck me was how tall he was! Then how confident and easy going he came across. Even as I meet writers and talk with them, I still struggle to get away from the stigma attached to fantasy writers that they are all kind of quiet and reserved, I’m getting there though.

It was my first face to face review with an author, the majority have been over phone or by email, so Brandon allowed me to get over my nerves a little with some conversation and gave me his thoughts of London.

Moving on to the interview, it was as planned a video interview. The material I collected was about 40-45 minutes, which was pretty much perfect for me. I didn’t want to push Brandon too hard, because he’d been in interviews since 11:00am – so I’m sure his charisma and brightness during the interview will impress you all in hindsight!

The questions I asked…I was pretty proud of them. I hope everyone is satisfied with what I asked. I really struggled with unique questions for Brandon, because he is such an active person in the community already. That means that finding questions that would be interesting and new to the community took some time. It also took a bit of outside the box thinking from myself and our forum members. Some of the questions I asked, I think were quite tough. And I was expecting at least one, maybe two, “I’d prefer not to answer that” type responses. But nope, Brandon was happy to answer everything I asked directly.

I want to leave you now by sharing my thoughts on how Brandon sees his role. Brandon Sanderson loves you as a community and he feels that he has a responsibility to you as members of that community.

That sounds pretty deep…and it is. When I asked Brandon what hurts him, he told me, “disappointing fans” and I could really sense the pain there as he reflected on that. I get the sense that because he is so emotionally attached to his writing, we are in really safe hands in regards to his future work. People ask if he can keep putting books out at the speed he does and the answer is ‘yes’, because he does it for us.

So finally, Thank you to Brandon, not only for the interview, but for the gifts you give to the fantasy genre and the promise that you will continue to give them willingly.

You can watch the video interview with Brandon here.

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