Now, one of the interesting things that happened along the way to Knife of Dreams was that you took a small pause and wrote a rather short novel called New Spring .
Yes.
And out of New Spring , which is essentially a prequel to story line that we have in the Wheel of Time novels, became a new project: a series of graphic novels of New Spring . How did that come about?
Well, the Dabel Brothers approached me, and other people who had written stories in Bob Silverberg’s anthology, Legends , and asked whether we would allow them to do comic books of our novellas, the comic books to be collected into a graphic novel once they were all done, and I had begun the project already—or completed the project—of expanding my novella “New Spring” into the novel New Spring , and I said, “Well, no I don’t want you to do the novella. Do the complete story. You can do New Spring .”
Now, you’re listed of course as the writer because you created the storyline. Did you actually go over and develop the individual scripts for each of novels?
No, Chuck Dixon does the scripts; the scripts are then sent to me, then I go through them and make corrections and changes, and suggest sometimes a different view, a different scene. I don’t mess with it a lot because Chuck Dixon knows what he’s doing; on the other hand, I know the book, so sometimes I say, “Look, this is important; you really need to put this in; it’s more important than that other thing.”
How have you found the work? Have you been enjoying seeing them coming out in a different form?
Oh yes, the artwork is fantastic, and I’ve worked very hard with them to get the characters as close as possible as the way I seem them—I say ‘as close as possible’; it couldn’t be absolutely the way I see them unless I could draw, which I cannot. And also Trollocs. For the first time, Trollocs are being drawn the way I envision Trollocs.
Of course, that will be helpful to all the fans of the books, unless of course their own vision is the one they prefer.
The Dabel Brothers published their correspondence with RJ in the complete graphic novel.
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