Brandon Sanderson

Nine years ago, I showed up to a reading at a large science fiction convention, full of excitement, and faced the exact same sight. Eventually, one friend showed up. I did my reading for him and the person he brought.

Today, I literally type this from the back seat of a car service taking me to a signing where we are expecting hundreds of people, with my new book giving GRRM's new book a run for its money on the bestseller lists.

Don't give up. If nobody shows, ask the bookstore to give you a table near a high traffic area, and hand out bookmarks/chat with the people who walk by. Give a free copy to any booksellers on staff who like your sort of novel. (Your publisher will often provide extra copies for this purpose.) Start building a mailing list to let readers know when you have signings.

Most importantly, write that next book and make it awesome.

Ha. If you saw the rest of my house, you'd think of it as a nice (but middle class) house in suburbia. But when I bought that house in 2008 (which was, admittedly, the exact right time to be buying a house...) I noticed there was a lot next door, undeveloped.

So I started to plan. And the next year, I bought that lot. When my wife asked what I wanted to do with it, I was quite decisive.

I wanted an underground supervillain lair.

I've spent the last eleven years planning it, and it's almost done. Still a few things we need to get finished. The place where the filming took (it's a little nook under the mezzanine) will be my office. The big portion outside (with the fishtank) is what I'm calling the Adventurer's Club--a kind of large gathering space.

Up the steps (with the stained glass windows) goes beneath the driveway into the regular house. The theater is off the mezzanine. I am a bit of a movie buff, and one of my dreams has always been for a nice theater. Though it's owned by me, we use it as a company perk, assigning one night a week to each of my core team. (Peter and Karen have Mondays reserved, Emily and I take Wednesdays, etc. Two nights a week are wildcards for other members of the company to reserve for their friends or family.)

It's...admittedly a little extravagant. Mostly because I stuck it all below ground for...well, reasons. I mean, you can't put a supervillain lair where everyone else can just see it out in the open, right?

So, I'll admit, I've been considering the cheese question since it was asked.

I'm not sure if it has to be cheese. But any object that is sufficiently thick but also sufficiently pliable that it's going to press down on the blade while it's cutting IS going to create drag on the blade.

The Blade does, by necessity of my understanding of the relevant physics, need to be able to vaporize a tiny bit of matter into Investiture while cutting, in order to create space for the Blade to continue to slide through. This is related to why it doesn't cut things with souls.

At the same time, I'm not convinced that this is relevant to the actual question being asked. I think that I have to relent that, with a sufficiently large block of cheese and a Shardbearer trying to cut lengthwise through it, the drag produced on the flat of the blade is going to tire the Shardbearer. Making cheese legitimately more difficult to cut through than stone or metal. And a big enough block of cheese might stop the slice straight up, because the weight placed on the blade will be pretty heavy.

That said, the top replies to this thread are pretty relevant, and are correctly explaining the mechanics of the situation. There is this little "shield of vaporization" around a Blade while it cuts, so a thinner Blade (like Szeth's Honorblade) might not have this drawback at all. It depends on how far back the shield of vaporization extends, and how thick the blade is.

My current instinct says that wider blades would be stopped by this, and so those of you planning to make ten-foot-thick walls of cheese to stop an invading Shardbearer can continue in your...endeavors.

Remember, kids, keep your Shardblade thin for actual combat (for multiple reasons.) Only make the big showy forms when you're trying to look intimidating. (With a nod to the fact that a thick blade does tend to be better for getting through Shardplate, giving you more mass to hit with. Choose Adolin's Blade for Shardplate Duels. Szeth/Jezrien's Honorblade for cheese.)