So, actually, in The Gathering Storm you’ve had to do a fair amount of legwork to make sure that everything is prepared for the finale.
Yes! That’s one of the reasons why we felt we needed to split the books. It was partially because the outline detailed so many things for us to do, and Robert Jordan had been saying for some time that it was going to be an enormous book. And part of the reason also was that I needed some legwork—time to set up all of these things that were going to happen. If you look at the end of Knife of Dreams , you’ve got characters scattered to the far reaches of the world, and we know—we’ve all known as fans for a while—that they’re going to have to gather back together for the Last Battle. It’s got to come, but they’re still scattered all over the place. He started to draw them back together at the end of Knife of Dreams , but we really needed a staging book to bring some of these things back together, and to accomplish some of the goals he had set forth. That’s really what The Gathering Storm is: it’s focusing on several of the main characters who need to be in a certain place, both spiritually and physically. As characters they need to be in a certain place mentally, in who they are, and physically they need to arrive in certain destinations, and so I focus a lot on that.
In many ways, it’s a more personal book, in that it’s more focused on several of the big main characters.
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