Tor Books is eye-wideningly excited to announce that TWO new Mistborn novels by Brandon Sanderson will be released in late 2015 and early 2016!

The novels will continue Wax and Wayne’s adventures in the world of Mistborn, a series begun by 2011’s The Alloy of Law, which was itself a short story that just kept growing and growing until, well, until it grew into a series of novels!

Sanderson was already hard at work on the follow-up novel to Alloy of Law, when something unexpected happened. Tor Books editor Moshe Feder explains:

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in ten years of working with Brandon, it’s that he almost always delivers more than we’ve asked for and that he loves to surprise us. We were awaiting the arrival of the previously-announced sequel to The Alloy of Law called Shadows of Self when he did it again, presenting us with not just one newborn novel, but twins! The surprise package was the third Wax & Wayne adventure, Bands of Mourning. The resulting atmosphere around the office was a heady combination of Christmas morning and the first night of Chanukah.

Sanderson later explained through a Twitter chat with iBooks how the extra novel came about:

.@iBooks So I worked on the outline for the Wax and Wayne sequence to get myself back into the world. In doing so, I got excited about #6. — Brandon Sanderson (@BrandSanderson) December 18, 2014

(Mistborn book #6 is Bands of Mourning)

.@iBooks So I started working on that one, and wrote the whole thing as a kind of “Warm up.” Once done, I was back into the world. — Brandon Sanderson (@BrandSanderson) December 18, 2014

.@iBooks That made it easy to jump back to book five and finish off that one, which I was now very excited about doing. — Brandon Sanderson (@BrandSanderson) December 18, 2014

.@iBooks So…yeah. I kind of wrote a book as a warm up to write a different book. My process can be crazy sometimes, but it really worked — Brandon Sanderson (@BrandSanderson) December 18, 2014

Brandon also revealed the plan for Wax and Wayne.

.@iBooks So, there will be a total of FOUR Wax and Wayne era Mistborn novels. Alloy of Law, plus a Trilogy I plotted after finishing it. — Brandon Sanderson (@BrandSanderson) December 18, 2014

You can read the details at length over on Brandon’s blog.

Shadows of Self, the second book in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn series, is currently scheduled to arrive on shelves and ereaders in October 2015, followed by Bands of Mourning in January 2016. Tor Books and Tor.com will announce precise release dates as soon as we have them!

You can pre-order Shadows of Self right now.