Wee-hour musings paying off for author

PROVO — For five years, Brandon Sanderson spent the quiet midnight hours weaving tales of fantastical worlds filled with magic, intrigue and secrecy.

A graveyard shift at Provo's Best Western CottonTree Inn yielded a total of nine books for the budding writer, a student at the time, who pounded out page after page until 5 a.m. each morning while working at the hotel desk.

Two published novels and 12 book deals later, the 31-year-old author can afford to devote daylight hours to his work — although his wife, Emily, tells stories of late-night writing binges.

Sanderson recently received a six-figure advance from Scholastic, the "Harry Potter"-series publisher, for a children's fantasy series about a boy named Alcatraz who does battle with a cult of evil librarians.

These recent writing successes, though, resulted from years of hard work — a fact Sanderson likes to point out to students in his class, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, at Brigham Young University.

"A lot of people say my 'debut' novel doesn't feel like a first novel," Sanderson said. "Well, that's because it's not. It's my sixth novel."

The day Sanderson received an offer for "Elantris" from an editor at Tor Books, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy, made all the late hours worth it, he said.

"I just about fainted when I got this news," Sanderson said. "Finally somebody bought one."

"Elantris," which hit bookshelves in May 2005, was one of 13 "practice" novels he wrote while attending undergraduate and graduate school at BYU.

"A lot of people give up after writing a book and not selling it," Sanderson said. "My opinion is, just keep at it."

And keep at it he has. Sanderson currently has 80,000 copies of his books in print. The first of a trilogy called "Mistborn" appeared in bookstores in July 2006, and the second is slated for publication on Aug. 21.

The first of the Alcatraz series, "Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians," will come out Oct. 1 and other books are planned for May 2008 and early 2009.

Unique plots characterize much of Sanderson's writing, said his literary agent, Joshua Bilmes.

"It was clear looking at his work that Brandon had more ideas in one book than a lot of fantasy writers have in their entire career," said Bilmes, of JABberwocky Literary Agency. "This was just stunning to me because it was so beyond what other writers I was reading were capable of doing."

Both of Sanderson's published novels include maps to help readers orient themselves in the kingdoms he has created, and "Mistborn" even has its own alphabet, designed by Isaac Stewart, who also drew each of the maps.