You’re midway through your concluding trilogy in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel Of Time. Can you tell us a little bit about the latest novel, Towers Of Midnight ?
This is the second of the three books. What happened was, about two years back I’d planned to write the last book as just one book. And it was getting rather large, and the publisher was getting rather scared, so he talked to Harriet—Robert Jordan’s widow—and they discussed it, talked to me and said ‘Would there be natural break points if we were to publish this as three volumes?’ We weren’t expanding it at all, I was to write it in the same length, but they’d do it as three. There were actually natural break points; the first volume that we published, The Gathering Storm , was a very focused narrative—I’d written several plotlines for several of the main characters. They’re very tense narratives taking them to some very important moments in their lives. It worked very well to break the book after that. What the second one does—it’s actually a little more true to form for the Wheel Of Time series because we expand vision and scope in this novel. This is the novel where we reach out, and instead of having that very focused, narrow visual edge to the last book, which worked very well. But there are hundreds of characters in this series, and some of them had to—for the last book to work—the focus had to be shifted away from them. In this book, we’re opening the world back up, looking at what’s going on around the world in all of these different narratives instead of having primarily two main focuses, we’re looking at everybody again. This is the penultimate book. We’re ramping up for the ending, essentially of the world in these books; this has everybody turning their eyes towards that and it all coming together. It’s very large, it’s very, I guess, epic is the word that you’d use for what’s going on.
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.