You are often referred to as Robert Jordan’s biggest fan. What were conversations with him like, and did he ever bounce ideas for his writing off of you?
Obviously, our conversations started a long, long, long time before The Wheel of Time. The ideas of The Wheel of Time, yeah, he bounced those off me while he was writing other stuff, because this is what he was thinking about.
Something I haven’t told you before, early on, when he was writing the Conan stuff—which I read because it is Jim’s work and I like Jim—it wasn’t my bailiwick. The Conan stuff was written for a particular demographic and he kept asking me, “What do you think? What do you think?” I would never give in. So, finally, in response to the nitpicking “What do you think”, I started a narrative that sounded like a prologue leading into one of the Conan books, any one of them. Generic, but it was one of the Conan books. He just paused, and I looked at him and said, “What?” He said, “Predictable, right?” And I said, “I didn’t say a thing, Jim.”
So yes, he’d bounce ideas off me and would say, “You need to get away from this, soon as you can.” And the seven of them he wrote were great, but they were what they were. He talked about what he was going to do, and he noodled it around in his head for about ten years before he wrote it. After The Wheel of Time started being written, it was his work, so I didn’t talk to him much about it, or he didn’t talk to me much about it. If he was thinking about something or an idea, he might bounce it off of me, but because we lived four hours apart and were together less frequently, when we were together it was, “Let’s go do something else.” Let’s go to dinner, or let’s go fishing, which he just absolutely loved to do. I liked fishing, he loved fishing, so I’d go fishing because it was time with him and time away from work and the books.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.