Please tell me all you can about the potential novella that fills in holes ? What holes? Who? Where will it be published if written? Is this material that you really wanted to include in Towers of Midnight or The Gathering Storm but just couldn’t fit in? How does this match up with your feeling about not writing other stuff in the WOT world?
There are about 50,000 words of secondary plots that Sanderson wants to include in Towers of Midnight . He’s just not sure all of it will get into the book. If something gets cut, he’d like to get to his fans on his website.
This lead to quite a bit of discussion about Towers of Midnight . It will be a very different book from The Gathering Storm . The Gathering Storm was very intentionally focused. Brandon felt strongly that a ‘hit’ wasn’t good enough, that The Gathering Storm needed to be a home run. (At the table, we all thought it was a home run.) Towers of Midnight will need to catch up many plot threads and will be much less focused. This will have its problems and it will be a big struggle to find the right balance—they aren’t there yet in the writing process. Brandon mentioned a few plots as examples which strongly suggests they will be in Towers of Midnight —Loial, Lan, Fain, Taim, Logain, Elayne, if Mat does what fans think he will, etc.
My impression is that the novella, will actually be a series of prologue-like scenes that just don’t make it into the final book.
This also lead to lots of discussion on the Encyclopedia. It will include lots of spoilery stuff that doesn’t make it into the books. But, there are several examples in the notes where RJ specifically says that certain plots will not be revealed. Someone asked about Merilille—the Aes Sedai in Caemlyn who ran away with a Sea Folk apprentice. It was implied that this may be a thread that goes unresolved.
The novella was to be about Pevara and the events at the Black Tower. Brandon later decided that the novella probably wasn’t going to work . He got two chapters into Towers of Midnight and the rest into A Memory of Light .
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