Do you know who Brandon Sanderson is?

He is currently the best-selling fantasy author on the face of the earth. He's alarmingly prolific; he writes like three novels per year, all over 130,000 words. I think I read that during the pandemic, when people really needed stuff to read, he made $55 million in one year, as far as gross revenues. (Which is not the same as personal income to himself.)

I'm neither a fan nor a critic; I've never read him. My only encounter with Sanderson is that this past week, while out for a run/walk, I listened to him give a class about worldbuilding in fantasy/sci-fi fiction.

I guess listening to that prompted YouTube to think I was a super-fan, because it then recommended a video about an absolutely toxic, hateful hit-piece that Wired just ran on Sanderson.

The hit-piece attacks him over the pettiest of things: He's boring when he speaks, and doesn't leave the nasty article-scribbler any good quotes. He doesn't dress well. His wife is boring. He's an observant Mormon, which is something the hateful pillowbiter keeps coming back to

And he complains bitterly that Sanderson is making so, so much money.

A friend of mine is very #Based, but he frequently hangs out with old friend I've lost touch with. They're neoliberals -- shitlibs. And my friend complains to me: "They all say they're good little socialists and want to do nothing but to improve the lot of the Poor Black Man in America, but all they ever talk about is money, unceasingly, and how it's a cosmic injustice they're not making more of it and how it's even worse that everyone who is stupider than they are -- and according to them, everyone in the world is stupider than they are -- is making more money than them.

Keep my friend's observation about shitlibs in mind if you read this hit-piece. The writer claims to be a "poet" of some low stature; I can only imagine how little money he makes, and how much it burns his soul that this boring, unfashionable God-fearing Mormon is making so much of it.

All shitlibs do, as Ethan Van Sciver termed it, is to "count other people's money."

Here's the headline and subhed:

Brandon Sanderson Is Your God

Hes the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He�s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.

What?

Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-ish, never-ending, speed-written fantasy books, it's huge. By Sanderson's estimation, he's the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign--$42 million of that $55 million--I came to the WIRED offices ready to gossip. How'd he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?

Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about.

On the one hand, who cares. Sanderson has millions upon millions of fans all over the planet; it doesn't matter that some losers at a single magazine (even if it is one of the nerdier ones) had never heard of him. On the other, the ignorance goes far beyond WIRED. As far as I can tell, Sanderson, who has been topping bestseller lists for the better part of the 21st century, has not been written about in any depth by any major publication ever. I called his publicist to confirm this. "Well, we have a piece coming up in LDS Living," he told me. That's LDS as in Latter-day Saints. It's a magazine for Mormons.

Which makes sense: Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there's a hole the size of Utah where the man's literary reputation should be. Is it because he mostly writes fantasy, a -- so the snobs sneer -- "subliterary" genre? But then, so do J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and George R. R. Martin, and they're household names. Is it because none of Sanderson's work has been adapted for the screen? Well, he wrote three of the Wheel of Time books, and an adaptation of that series came out on Amazon Prime in 2021. Could it be, finally, because he's a weirdo Mormon? But so are Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), Glen A. Larson (the original Battlestar Galactica), and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight). Mormon, I mean. Only Orson Scott Card is also a weirdo.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm learning so much about tolerance for diversity from embittered hate-filled loser shitlibs!

Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, makes versions of these excuses, plus others, for his writerly obscurity. It's kind of fun to talk about, until it isn't, and that's when I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He's excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese--this being days before I'd meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement -- I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.

I only have one question: What are your pronouns?!?!

Here's another cringily self-revealing passage:

He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn't. He isn't. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.

So, recklessly, I say what's on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments. I don't care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don't write very well.

I think this passage explain the hatred:

It's not that Brandon Sanderson can't write. It's more that he can't not write. Graphomania is the name of the condition: the constant compulsion to get words out, down, as much and as quickly as possible. The concept of a vacation confuses Sanderson, he once said, because for him the perfect vacation is more time to write -- vocation as vacation. His schedule is budgeted down to the minute, months out, to maximize the time he spends, rather counter-ergonomically, on the couch, typing away. Most days, he wakes up at 1 pm, exercises, and writes for four hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for four more. After that he plays video games or whatever until 5 am. A powerful sleeping pill is all that works, finally, to get him, and the voices in his head, to shut up.

In the five months or so it has taken me to sit down and write this magazine story, which is 4,000 words long, Sanderson has published two books. During the Covid lockdowns, he wrote and/or edited seven: two for his regular publisher, a graphic novel, and four more in secret, telling no one but his wife until he surprise-announced a Kickstarter in March 2022 to crowdfund their publication. (Hence the $42 mil, raised in a month, by far the most successful Kickstarter ever.) Since his debut, Elantris, in 2005, Sanderson has published 30-plus books, the biggest ones in excess of 400,000 words; there are far more if you count the novellas and graphic novels and stuff for kids.

This jerkoff complains that it took him five months to read this high-school-girl slambook of an article, and complains that while he was procrastinating and not working for five months, Sanderson published not one but two new novels. So I think you can see the reason for the unjustified hatred. You probably won't be surprised to hear that Jason Kehe has no works listed on Amazon. Below, a video from what I imagine is a nonpolitical normie who is probably "liberal" in the normal unexamined-life sort of way, reacting to this "unhinged" hit-piece. I say he must be a "nonopolitical normie" because he's shocked to see this level of unreasoning hatred issuing from a "real media" outlet like Wired. LOL. So I don't think he knows that this is all the shitlib media does -- attack people, throw around slanders, and bitterly count other people's money. He keeps saying "this article can't be real" and "when I read this article, I was sure it was some kind of joke."