The folks at Tor Books appear to be keeping you on a very tight leash ever since you accepted to complete Robert Jordan’s magnus opus. Working on The Wheel of Time and The Stormlight Archive (a ten-volume saga) certainly means that you are juggling countless balls simultaneously. Add to that the fact that you are a teacher and a family man, with all that it entails. Are you concerned that keeping such a harsh schedule might at some point prove to be too much and hinder the creative process altogether?
Yes. Which is why I’ve decided to slow down. This last year was a very hard year, and it’s something I did to myself by deciding that I really wanted to do The Way of Kings right now. I felt this was the time that it needed to be released. But now I get to slow down, and I’m not going to be releasing two epic fantasies a year from now on. This is the end of that. I’m going to focus on finishing the Wheel of Time right now, and then I won’t have to juggle all of those balls anymore.
When you describe it like that it looks a lot more impressive than it really is; when I teach, I only teach one class one night a week, for one semester—four months out of the year. It’s not like I’m a professor. And I don’t have a commute, which means that I can still work fourteen-hour days some days (twelve hours has been more common), yet spend a significant amount of time with my family. But I don’t have to do that anymore. It was a really hard year. It really pushed me. I think both books turned out fantastically well, but if I had kept up that schedule, my writing would have begun to suffer. From now on I’ll be working at a much more modest pace.
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