Brandon, thank you very much for being with us. Well, we’ve got plenty to talk about, so let’s start with The Gathering Storm . This is brand new, I think it was released last week. Can you tell us how The Gathering Storm came to be?
Well, The Gathering Storm is the first, as you said, in the sequence of novels completing the Wheel of Time. Wheel of Time is a huge long-running wonderful fantasy series that I began reading when I was 15 years old, written by an author named Robert Jordan. Robert Jordan passed away in 2007, and at that point I was just a fan. I was devastated, like many of us. He had fought a long battle with a rare blood disease, amyloidosis. And I, like most of the fans, just worried about what would happen to the series.
I didn’t apply to finish it or to work on it or anything. I simply got a phone call one morning from his widow, who was also his editor. And she was wondering if I would be interested in working on the series. She had read a eulogy I’d written for Robert Jordan, and I’d come recommended to her as an author who was a big fan of the series, but also an author in his own right. And she read my book Mistborn and wanted me to finish the series. And so, it’s really been a very surreal experience, spending many years reading these books and loving these books, and becoming an author myself in part because of how much I love these books. And then, being asked to finish them, it’s been very strange, but also a very reverent process, because, you know, in a lot of ways, this is my hero’s legacy I’m working on. So yeah, it’s been great, and it’s been daunting all at the same time.
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