Harriet in particular was very up front about a topic that I imagine they thought to be a bit sensitive, though obvious if you think about it. Which was the… hm, not sure what word to use here. Caution? Admonition? Caveat? Not sure. Let’s go with “forewarning”—forewarning that Book 12 (and 13, and 14) are not “Robert Jordan” books. They are “Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson” books.
As Brandon put it, if they had wanted someone to slavishly imitate Jordan’s prose and style and try to make it seem like it was actually Jordan writing, they could have done that (or tried, as Brandon was of the opinion that not even a skilled ghostwriter would have been really successful at mimicking Jordan’s voice), but that was not what Harriet and Tom wanted. They wanted (and I’m paraphrasing here a little) to finish the series in a way that honored Jordan’s vision without insulting his memory by, essentially, pretending he hadn’t passed on. Which is something that I personally can completely get behind; the “ghostwriter” option strikes me as nothing less than ghoulish, so good on Team Jordan for not going that route. Brandon’s aim in writing, therefore, has been to capture the feel of the Wheel of Time (and keeping everything that Jordan actually wrote before he died intact) while still bringing his own experience and voice to the table. In other words, he’s in there too.
Which I imagine is going to anger some people, and I’m telling those people right now: deal. Of course ideally we would have preferred to have the finale of the Wheel of Time as written by Robert Jordan and Robert Jordan alone, but we can’t have that, and that’s no one’s fault, least of all Harriet et al. I can’t encapsulate everything they said at this panel about it without going on for a hundred years (and this is thing is already frighteningly long), but if you want my take on it, after hearing what they had to say (and having read Brandon’s previously published novels) I am at the very least deeply curious to see the result. Take it for what it’s worth, but I think it’s going to be pretty damn cool. You can think I drank the Koolaid or whatever, and there’s certainly the possibility that I am wrong, and that’s fine, but if you insist on pissing and moaning about something that for all intents and purposes was unavoidable (not to mention the best solution available anyway), I really have no sympathy. Put up or shut up.
(Well, come on, I couldn’t have a whole blog post go by without saying something incendiary!)
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