Like many of you, I was shocked when he passed away. I’d been following the blog, and he’d been very optimistic on his blog. He had this force of will, force of optimism. You know, even though he had a terrible disease, I was sure he would make it. And then he was gone. And it was a very strange moment for me to realize that because when he died, it was like my high school friends had all died at once. And I wondered and felt that that might be the end of it all. Um, yeah. . . little did I know.
About three weeks later, I got up in the morning at the bright hour of noon. I picked up my cell phone to check my voice mail, which is usually the first thing I do in the mornings. And I was just groggily. . . I turned it on and there’s a voice mail from a number I don’t recognize, and the voice comes on and says, and this is an exact quote:
“Hello, Brandon Sanderson. This is Harriet McDougal Rigney. I’m Robert Jordan’s widow. I would like you to call me back. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
I just about fell out of the couch, which is kind of hard to do, because. . . you know. . . yeah. I mean, I listened to that voice message three times in a row, and then nervously dialed the number back, and it rang, and it rang, and she didn’t answer. So I nervously called my editor, and he didn’t answer. And I nervously called my agent, who always answers, and he didn’t answer. I eventually got smart and called up Tor, and got a hold of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who said, with kind of a smug tone, “Oh, that. Yeah, it’s probably what you think it is. I’ll have her call you back.” And I’m sitting here thinking, “What do I think it is, Patrick? Tell me something!” And he wouldn’t. And so, eventually Harriet called me and said, “Well, I’m putting together a short list of people. And I was wondering if you would be interested in completing the Wheel of Time.”
That night after I’d said yes, I laid in bed that night unable to sleep because I was terrified by what I had just done in saying yes to this. Particularly because that night I came to realize something. Something very, very frightening. And what I realized was that I could not write as good a book as Robert Jordan would have written for the ending. I realized that nobody could. I couldn’t replace him, and no one could. We should have had him to finish this series. And by saying yes, I had agreed to in small part to something at which I would fail, at least in part, because no one can replace Robert Jordan. As a fan and as a professional writer, I realized that the next best thing for me in having Robert Jordan complete the book was to do it myself because then I could know that it would not get screwed up. I realized that if I said no, and then someone else did it and did a poor job, it would be partially my fault. And that in taking up this project, I could bring them back. Robert Jordan had passed away, but that didn’t mean that Rand and Egwene and Mat and Perrin and Avi and Cadsuane and everybody had to be gone. I could at least bring them back for everyone else. And I realized with a really powerful emotion that I needed to do this book. I had to do this book, because of all the people in the world, I would screw it up the least.
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.