I know fans of the series have a lot of questions about how you ended up being the writer for this.
Oh, yeah. A lot of people are curious about how I ended up writing these books. It’s actually…I’m a little bit curious myself, to be perfectly honest. The first I heard that I was being considered for it was when I received a phone call. I got up in the morning, I went downstairs and checked my voice mail. Out of the blue, there was a voice mail from someone who said, “Hi, Brandon Sanderson. This is Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s widow. I want you to call me back. There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Which…I mean, I assumed had to be a joke from my friends, right? I mean, I’d been reading the Wheel of Time books since I was a kid. I picked up the first one when I was fifteen. First week of its publication I had a copy of that and had been reading them ever since.
And when Robert Jordan passed away, I was grief stricken like everyone else. We thought he was doing fine. His most recent blog post which I’d read was…you know, he was very optimistic he was going to pull through. And then when we found out that he’d passed away, we weren’t sure how to react. And now here was his wife calling me. I hadn’t applied for this or anything. I later found out that she had read some words I’d posted on my web site about what Robert Jordan had meant to me. And she had really been touched by those, and had asked for a copy of one my books, Mistborn, from Tom Doherty, the publisher at Tor. And he’d sent her one and she’d read that. And based off of that, that’s why she wanted to talk to me.
So I called her back and actually, she didn’t answer—she was out getting a massage. So, I’m kind of at my wit’s end going crazy, what’s going on. I called my agent, who also didn’t answer, which is very rare for him, so it was quite the odd coincidence. So I called my editor, and he didn’t answer—not so rare for him, but… So nobody—my wife wasn’t there, I didn’t know what was going on. Finally, I got a hold of someone at Tor, who then got a hold of Tom, who got a hold a Harriet, who called me back. And indeed, it was just her asking if I was interested in finishing the Wheel of Time, taking the materials that Robert Jordan left behind and making the last book out of it.
I was dumbfounded, honestly, when I was talking to her. I was unable to even pronounce words because I was so shocked. I actually…I wrote her a letter the next day, sent it via Tor, an email which said, “Dear Harriet, I’m not an idiot, I promise,” because I really just stuttered and slurred. But of course, I really was excited. I wanted to do this. I mean, for an author…I got into writing partially because of Robert Jordan, by reading his books when I was young. I actually studied his novels to learn how to write a book. I considered him a mentor in many ways, even though I’d never met him. I mean, I’d seen him. I’d gone to events where he’d been, but I never even talked to him. And so, the next best thing to having him be able to finish this, in my mind, was for me to be able to work on it because I knew and loved the series.
And the characters from these books are like old friends. You know, I was one of these kind of quiet reading kids when I was in high school. I did have some friends, but my closest friends were the friends that I had in my books that I read. And Mat and Perrin and Nynaeve, Egwene, these people, these are my friends from childhood that I grew up. These are my high school buddies in many ways. Being able to go back to this as the writer…I couldn’t even express how daunting, yet exciting, that felt to me. And so afterward, I did write Harriet a letter. She took about a month making a decision, thinking about me and thinking about other authors. And then, she called me back—this would be November of 2007—she called me back and said, “I really want you to do it.” And by December, we had a contract, and I was in Charleston picking up the notes and materials. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, is working on this.
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