Bestselling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has published a wide range of books over the years, but on Saturday at the FanX convention in Salt Lake City, he read from a book that he told fans he’ll (probably) never finish writing.
The reason?
It’s “too silly,” Sanderson told the audience gathered in the Grand Ballroom of the Salt Palace Convention Center.
During his appearance at the pop culture and comic convention, Sanderson also interacted with fans in a Q&A session, answering questions on everything from mental health to whether he would ever consider buying the now-defunct Evermore Park in Utah County, and shared some tidbits about his upcoming projects.
Here are some of the highlights from Sanderson’s FanX appearance.
Brandon Sanderson reads from new book at FanX
Sanderson shared three chapters of an unfinished and untitled book with the audience at FanX — but with a caveat.
“This is the one that went a little bit too far,” Sanderson said of the story before he began reading.
Though the book doesn’t have a title, he called Chapter 1 “The Princess.” The story follows a very spoiled princess who, Sanderson told the audience, eventually would have had to face down a dragon in order to inherit her kingdom.
So why did Sanderson choose not to finish writing the story?
“It was fun,” he said. “It matches a lot of the storytelling styles and things like you might have seen in ‘Dealing with Dragons’ by Patricia C. Wrede. … But it was too silly, too noncanon, to fit in the Cosmere.”
He acknowledged that he may choose to finish the story someday, but if he did, he wouldn’t set it within his “Cosmere” universe, in which many of his novels (including the “Stormlight Archive” and “Mistborn” series) are set.
Would Brandon Sanderson buy Evermore Park?
Evermore Park, a fantasy theme park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, shut down last year, but fans have ideas about how it could return.
During the Q&A session, Sanderson was asked whether he would ever consider buying it, and the author replied that he had “thought about it seriously.”
Sanderson already owns 9 acres of land next to the park, which, he said at last year’s FanX, would be used to build a bookstore and a surrounding area called Dragonsteel Plaza.
“If we did it, it would probably not be to bring Evermore back,” Sanderson said of buying the park. “I just don’t know that the Evermore model would work really well, but Evermore might be a really good place for a bookstore, and then that other land we can use for something else or sell it off.”
However, Sanderson said that he thought buying Evermore would be “a dangerous thing to do.”
“It’s not impossible, but it is expensive,” he said. “Even for me, it’s pretty expensive. And I don’t want to do anything that risks the jobs of my employees.”
How Utah’s slot canyons helped inspire ‘The Stormlight Archive’
Naturally, many of the fans’ questions centered around Sanderson’s books, including one question that asked where he first got the idea for his bestselling “Stormlight Archive” series, which begins with the novel “The Way of Kings.”
“I can trace the first idea for the setting back to the idea of a storm,” Sanderson said.
One of Sanderson’s college roommates was a photography major who loved to visit slot canyons in southern Utah to take photographs, and Sanderson said he would sometimes travel with his roommate to the canyons and help him with his camera equipment.
“I just wanted to sit in my room and write books,” he said, “but I knew that I needed to actually leave my room in order to have things to write about.”
On one occasion, they were traveling to a slot canyon when his roommate said they wouldn’t be able to go that day because of rain.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ll ruin your camera equipment,’” Sanderson said, but then his roommate explained, “‘Oh no, it would kill us.’”
“He’s like, ‘If it rains, even a small amount, it can cause a giant flash flood in the canyons, because all the rain from a large plain will funnel into the slot canyon, and create a torrent and a rush,’” Sanderson continued. “‘And even if it’s a light sprinkle, sometimes it can be extremely dangerous.’”
And that was the spark of an idea for Sanderson.
His original draft of “The Way of Kings” even had a sequence that was set in a slot canyon, he said, though he later changed it. “But I spun that with the idea of a world that was hit by magical storms periodically.”
How Brandon Sanderson writes about mental health in his books
During another part of the Q&A session, a fan observed that Sanderson is “really inclusive” when it comes to portraying mental health challenges in his characters and asked how Sanderson wanted his readers who may struggle with similar issues to react to his books.
Part of the reason he wanted to depict mental health challenges in his stories, Sanderson replied, is because he felt like it was realistic — he wanted to show “the world as it is” and “people as they are.”
“I wasn’t seeing enough of that when I was reading, and I said, ‘Well, you know, the people in my life often struggle with something like this,’” Sanderson said. “I feel like if you were put in very high stress situations like the characters are, you would have some more people just naturally dealing with this. And I wanted to do it, but I wanted to do a good job with it.”
In order to do a good job, Sanderson said he does a lot of research online, reading about other people’s experiences. He also said that it’s helpful for him to have experts read his work and give him feedback and advice.
“If I can do a good enough job that you look and you say, ‘Yes, this is actually helping people kind of understand what it is to, you know, be me,’” Sanderson said, “I would love that to be the case.”
What’s next for Brandon Sanderson?
Sanderson has two books that will be published in the next few months.
The first is a collection of short fiction, “Tailored Realities,” which will be published Dec. 9. The other is “Isles of the Emberdark,” which was originally released as one of his “secret project” novels and will be published in February 2026.
Apart from his upcoming books, Sanderson will also be hosting his own annual convention, Dragonsteel Nexus, in December.