It’s the second day of the Celsius 232 festival, and the auditorium is packed. Dedicated fans had started lining up at 5AM for this 11AM panel, and were rewarded with cushy red velvet seats in a pleasurably dim auditorium. It’s mere minutes before fantasy titan Brandon Sanderson takes the stage to thunderous applause, joined by none other than Barbara Hambly, the author whose novel Dragonsbane first inspired him to love reading.
Moderated by the COO of Dragonsteel, Emily Sanderson, this panel felt like a reunion between old friends.
From Dragonsbane to Dragonsteel
Sanderson credits his eighth grade teacher for handing him Hambly’s Dragonsbane at just the right time. He was a 14-year-old with little to no interest in books until Jenny Waynest—the middle-aged heroine of Dragonsbane—captivated him.
Surprisingly, Dragonsbane isn’t about a teenage boy at all (which is what you might think would’ve captured a 14-year-old’s imagination), but instead, a woman balancing her family duties with her calling as a dragon-slaying sorceress. Through that story, young Brandon experienced the world “through the eyes of someone very different,” someone more like his mother than himself.
Barbara Hambly, for her part, is a legendary name across genres. She’s written classic epic fantasy (the Dragonsbane series), science fiction tie-ins like Children of the Jedi (one of her two Star Wars novels), Star Trek adventures, historical mysteries, and even scripts for Saturday morning cartoons. “You’ve done pretty much everything there is to do as a writer,” Brandon says in admiration, and it’s true. Hambly’s career spans from scholarly historical fiction to beloved franchises. (Sanderson confessed he’s especially fond of her Star Trek novels. As a teen he would scour used-book bins at Star Trek conventions for 50-cent paperbacks, and to this day he’s kept a few of his favorites—Barbara Hambly’s books are among them, of course.)
Exploring Origin Stories and Beyond
With Queen Emily facilitating, the discussion characteristically ranged from playful hypotheticals to deep writing philosophy. The first question was an ice-breaker: If you could instantly become the greatest writer ever, but you had to give up one of your five senses to do it, would you? And which sense?
Brandon shook his head at the magical bargain. “I don’t think I’d do it,” he said. “Our senses are too vital to writing stories, and I’ve read enough fantasy to know these deals never work out well!”
Barbara agreed it wasn’t worth it. But if forced to choose, she quipped she’d sacrifice taste. “I’m allergic to so many foods anyway,” she laughed. “There are already plenty of things I haven’t tasted in years.”
Moving on, Emily asked: If you didn’t write, what would you do instead? Both authors revealed that writing wasn’t their first or only career:
Barbara shared that she spent almost 20 years as an adjunct history professor. “I’d probably be a history professor,” she mused, had her writing career not taken off. (Making a living solely as an author can be tough “unless you’re Brandon Sanderson,” she added wryly.) In fact, Hambly once applied to teach creative writing but was turned down for lacking an MFA, despite already having dozens of published novels to her name. “I’ve published 60 books!” she remembers telling the hiring committee, to no avail. While the audience laughed, Brandon buckled down on the point: “It’s a serious problem in American education. They’d rather an academic than a professional.”
Brandon recounted his own pre-author day job: working the graveyard shift as a hotel front desk clerk. “I chose the night shift because I figured I could write books on the job,” he said. (Management didn’t mind: “the other guy just slept on the couch,” Brandon joked.) What would he do if he truly couldn’t be a writer? “Probably just die,” he deadpanned. Sanderson admitted he loves teaching too, but “the only thing I’m qualified to teach is creative writing. So if I wasn’t a writer… I’d be in trouble.”
Emily asked the two how long it typically takes them to finish a book. Do they have daily word count goals, or other routines from first draft to final?
Brandon turned to Barbara to compare habits. “Do you have a word count goal?” he asked. Hambly’s eyes sparkled as she delivered a hilarious reply: “That’s like asking if you have a sex count for the day.” Hambly explained she doesn’t measure her writing in strict daily word quotas. Instead, her process starts with an outline and a contracted length. “They tell me they want 80,000 or 90,000 words, and then I get nine months to do it,” she said. “The first draft is the hardest.”
Sanderson, by contrast, is famous for his prolific output. He admitted he drafts very quickly, often as fast as 7,000 to 10,000 words per day on a first draft. That speed means he can complete a novel’s initial version in a matter of weeks. However, Brandon noted that sometimes his memory plays tricks: “My problem is I remember things from the first draft better than any other,” he said, so revisions can get interesting when details change in later drafts. Despite their different approaches, both authors produce work at a pace that clearly works for them—one through steady, contract-driven timelines and the other through high daily word counts. It’s a good reminder that writers all work differently, and that should be embraced.
The panelists also reminisced about what they did with their very first advance payment as novelists:
Barbara grinned as she recounted turning in her first manuscript and signing the contract on a Friday many years ago. To celebrate, she went out of town with her karate dojo that weekend for a tournament. “I came back on Sunday, extremely hungover,” she admitted, rolling her eyes with a laugh. And on Monday morning, reality hit: the company at her day job had done a “reduction in force.” In other words, she was laid off. Suddenly that first advance check wasn’t party money at all, but her survival fund. “The first thing I did was support myself for a few months,” Hambly said.
Brandon’s first advance (about $5,000) came while he was in graduate school. “My parents kept calling me asking… so, career plans?” he joked. When he got the call that his debut novel sold on a Saturday, he walked in late to his Monday morning class and his professor asked if anything happened over the weekend. “I said, ‘I got a book deal,’ and the professor goes, ‘For money?’” The class erupted when Brandon announced the $5k amount. That professor then let Brandon submit the published book as his master’s thesis, making his thesis defense a mere formality. And what did a young Sanderson do with a windfall of five grand? “I put it down on a sports car,” he said with a sheepish grin. “Not a very nice one!” (The two-seater wasn’t practical once he had kids, so that car is long gone.)
Writing Craft: Drawing from Life and Finding Inspiration
Emily asked how much they base characters on people they know in real life. Do they worry about friends and family recognizing themselves in the books?
Sanderson said he sometimes tells his friends if they’ve inspired a character—and sometimes he definitely doesn’t tell them (especially if the character isn’t so flattering!). “It depends on what kind of character they are,” he said with a laugh. More often, he explained, it’s not a one-to-one translation but an aspect of a person that sparks a character idea. “I’m usually looking for someone with a conflict,” Brandon said. For example, he has a friend who is both a military reservist and a medical doctor, a combination that fascinates him: “He’s trained to heal and to kill, and I think that’s an interesting tension.” Such real-life contradictions can be great fertilizer for fictional characters, even if the characters themselves end up very different from the original friend.
Hambly smiled and said she often does unabashedly borrow from friends and relatives—mostly as an act of love. “One of the characters in my Victorian mystery series is based on my late husband,” she revealed. “He was very charming and good-for-nothing.” (This earned a big laugh.) Another example: an old friend of hers was a strikingly beautiful woman who absolutely refused to believe she was beautiful. “She was always three hours late because she’d spend forever putting on makeup,” Barbara said, illustrating how that friend’s insecurity became a quirk for a character. She’s also used her real-life police officer friend as the template for multiple cop characters in her books. “I write my friends in because I want them to live forever,” Hambly said softly. The audience awww’d at that heartfelt sentiment. In her own way, by fictionalizing people she cares about, she’s “reaching into the timestream and pulling them out” to preserve a piece of them on the page.
The discussion turned to what makes writing difficult, even for pros. What kinds of things can disrupt their writing flow or motivation?
“Contractors jackhammering the floor,” Barbara answered immediately, deadpan. The room cracked up at this very specific (and very relatable) image of interruption. Hambly explained that external distractions—like literal construction noise in the house—can completely throw her off her writing groove. Beyond the obvious physical distractions, she noted that certain personal or political issues can emotionally derail her focus too. “I like to think I have a cast-iron fuse, that nothing can set me off,” she said, “but there are definitely things that will throw me.”
Sanderson said for him the biggest challenge is the mental exhaustion that comes with travel and public events. “Being on tour is hard,” he admitted. “Yesterday I got maybe 250 words written, instead of my normal 2,000.” He was quick to reassure the fans, “I love you guys, it’s why I’m here!” but acknowledged that he has to balance touring with writing time. “People would like me to tour more, but then there’d be no books.” Writing a novel requires a certain mental freshness, and if he’s drained from interviews, signings, and flights, it’s tough to summon the creative energy at the end of the day. Brandon agreed with Barbara that physical tiredness is manageable – he can write when his body is tired, but “when I’m mentally worn out, that’s hard.”
Then, Emily posed a final question: How do you approach writing characters vastly different from yourself? For Brandon especially, this query hit close to home, and his answer brought the event’s theme full circle.
Sanderson grew thoughtful. “Honestly, this is why I write,” he said. “This goes down to the core of why I became a writer in the first place.” He then shared the story of reading Dragonsbane as a young teen. In Dragonsbane, Jenny is a middle-aged woman facing a midlife crisis, balancing magic and family. Nothing could be further from 14-year-old Brandon’s own life. “I read that book and realized: this is what it’s like to be my mom,” he said. “When you’re a 14-year-old boy, getting inside your mother’s head is rare.” That experience—stepping into the shoes of someone utterly unlike himself—started it all. “The desire to become a writer comes from that moment,” Brandon explained, because he wanted to give others the same gift that Barbara Hambly had given him. He wanted to create characters who could open windows into new perspectives and different lives, just as Dragonsbane had done for him.
Closing Thoughts
For fans in attendance (and those following online), this Sanderson-Hambly conversation was the kind of encounter conventions are made for. Equal parts fan celebration and craft masterclass. We got to see Brandon Sanderson not just as a prolific creator, but as a passionate reader glowing about an author who inspired him. And we saw Barbara Hambly not just as an “elder stateswoman” of fantasy, but as a sharp, funny, and generous storyteller who continues to inspire.
