So outside of this…How many years? From when you first sat down to write the first story, how many years has it encompassed?
About twenty-one years.
And in between that time when you’re not working on Wheel of Time…or has that been to dedicated strictly to Wheel of Time?
That has been dedicated strictly to Wheel of Time.
No short stories have come out? No…
I wrote a novella for Bob Silverberg’s anthology Legends —that was the origin of the novel New Spring , and I wrote a short piece for a BaltiCon program book—”The Strike at Shayol Ghul”—but everything else has been Wheel of Time. As a matter of fact, Jack Dann just asked me to do something non-Wheel-of-time for an anthology he’s putting together, and I’ve been noodling around with ideas for that, but it’ll be twenty-one years that I have written anything non-Wheel-of-Time-related.
Now that has to be a little bit frightening, since you’ve spent so much time inside this world, and you know this world so well, to break out into new territory. It’s exciting at one point, but at the same time, it’s not the same, right?
It’s not frightening. It’s very exciting. For about ten years, I’ve been bouncing around ideas in the back of my head. Nothing on paper, but quite a bit in the back of my head, as to what I will do when I finish Wheel of Time. I have a good bit of that already planned out. A trilogy, actually two sets of trilogies, to be called Infinity of Heaven.
So we’ll have to see that, but we have to wait a little bit until the other book comes out.
A little bit, yes.
The Jack Dann anthology was probably The Dragon Book , though likely RJ had to back out when he learned he was ill (presumably around this time).
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