Could you tell us a little bit about The Wheel of Time?
Sure. The Wheel of Time is a very important series to me as well as to a lot of my generation of fantasy readers. The first book was published in 1990, and it’s called The Eye of the World . It was one of those books that, in my opinion, took the genre in new directions. It built on what had been done before, but it did new and important things with the storytelling. It became the preeminent epic of my time. When I was a student in high school, The Wheel of Time became the best-selling fantasy series and one of my personal favorites, if not my number one favorite. While he was working on the final book of the series, which all of us had been waiting for, for almost twenty years, the author, Robert Jordan, passed away in 2007 from a very rare blood disease. It was one of those tragedies that you can’t even describe, and a lot of us didn’t know how to react. We knew that he was sick. He’d talked about it. He even mentioned it on his blog, but he always spoke so optimistically about it that we were all sure he was going to beat it. So when he passed away, it was a shock. Like every other fan, one of my first thoughts, besides my concern for his family, was, “Boy, I hope that whoever they give the last book to doesn’t screw it up.” It was probably a little selfish of us to think this, but we’d been following the series for so long. Lo and behold, about a month later, I woke up one morning and found that I had a voicemail. I listened to it, and it said, “Hello, Brandon Sanderson, this is Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s widow. I’d like you to call me back. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.” It was one of those moments where you are absolutely certain at first that someone is playing a prank on you and then you start to shake nervously at the thought that it might not be a prank.
When I got a hold of her, I found out that she was looking at me as one of the candidates to finish The Wheel of Time. I hadn’t applied for this or anything like that. These books are a really, really big deal. They are the biggest books that the publisher has, and I was absolutely stunned. It turns out that a number of people had recommended me to her, but she wanted to make sure I was interested first. She then went and read Mistborn before calling me back and asking me if I would do it. This isn’t the sort of opportunity that you pass up; you just don’t.
I considered Robert Jordan in many ways to be a mentor. I had read a lot of his books when I was trying to decide how to write myself, and he strongly influenced what I produced. I’d never met him, so I didn’t know him personally, and that’s what dumbfounded me when I got the phone call. After I accepted the offer, Harriet, Robert’s two assistants Alan and Maria (who have all been involved with The Wheel of Time for a very long time), and I started working on compiling the book. As to be expected, we found big holes in the writing that are now my job to fill—hundreds of thousands of words’ worth of things that still need to be written. We’ve got notes. We’ve got materials. We’ve got dictations. We’ve got all sorts of things. But it’s a big, big project.
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