So you are the chronology manager, or “Time Lord” of the Wheel of Time. What has it been like keeping the “what happened when” straight?
It actually has not been that bad to date because Jim himself set up so many timelines as part of the series. It was fun going back in his files and finding literally dozens of timelines of what was going to happen. With his engineer’s mind, it was important for him to grasp where every single character was at any given time in the series, know how they were meshing at any specific time in order to allow them to come together as part of the story later on and not be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, it was really just a matter of seeing where he was going with things and how he had structured them and tapping into that and then just extending it. You know, the harder part now is that Jim is gone, and so we have to make sure that all these threads fit. You have to know how far a horse can travel in a day, and how far a cart can travel in a day, how far an army can travel in a day, and how many days they can keep that pace. “Oh, Mat has to be at such-and-such a place to be able to meet with this person who is coming in from a totally different area.” So there is a lot of taking out the ruler and looking at the map and seeing how many kilometers or miles are between point A and point B.
On that note, do you have a more detailed map at your disposal?
No, we’re really working what you see in the book.
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