This year, with Words of Radiance , you return to one of your own worlds after years of working, or I should say publishing because of course in writing, everything takes years to appear, but after years of publishing novels in the Wheel of Time series, originated by Robert Jordan, how did it feel to return to your own world after such a big gap?
Well, I hadn’t ever spent that long away. The Wheel of Time was my dominating project for about five years. I grew up reading The Wheel of Time and though it belonged to someone else, it feels as much a familiar place to me as any world could. You start reading something when you’re 15, it’s going to feel very familiar to you.
I didn’t begrudge my time on The Wheel of Time. I really enjoyed my time on The Wheel of Time. As I was working on The Wheel of Time, I would stop in between books in The Wheel of Time and do little things. Granted, I didn’t have as much time to do larger works, but I did write Alloy of Law , which is a Mistborn book in between Wheel of Time books and I did have some time to work on the Stormlight Archive.
More I’d say, how do I feel with The Wheel of Time being done? At which thing that’s been dominated my life for five plus years my career, it’s a really odd feeling. Never before have I had a series get done that I wasn’t planning to someday go tweak a little bit more, add another short story in the world or something like that.
With The Wheel of Time, I don’t have that opportunity. It’s not appropriate to do it. Robert Jordan wanted it to be done. We’re going to leave it done. There is a strange sense of loss in finishing this series that I’ve never felt before.
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