How did your background in physics influence how you structured the world of the Wheel of Time?
Largely it was to make things realistic, as realistic as I can. Background in physics and engineering; I also tried to structure channeling as if it were a science or technology. No eye of newt, hair of dog. There are real limits, there are rules, there are technological structures to channeling which I think are fairly obvious to anyone who looks at it. That was the major influence.
Plus making sure that I see that everything is real. Well if I bring about a blacksmith, well I don’t know anything about blacksmithing, but I was able to get some nineteenth century books on blacksmithing, and once I had written the scenes I sent them to a woman I met that was a blacksmith and farrier, and she said you need to do this and you need to do that, but otherwise it is okay.
This woman was at the time the only woman blacksmith on the high council of American smithing. She made a lot of the stuff at Billy Graham’s in North Carolina, but she wrote wonderful comments back and said, if you want Perrin to ever have children, you must have a leather apron, which was among her other good bits.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.