Do you have the feeling that you’re among, let’s say, the top three of the fantasy authors who are the most talked about these days? Do you feel some kind of pressure for being so often in the headlines?
Oh, I don’t know. I would say that I do feel pressure. An example of this is: before The Wheel of Time, I spent a decent amount of time on web forums, I would visit these forums and talk, and nobody really knew who I was; some of them would see I’m a writer but you know, there are lots of writers. So suddenly this happened, and everyone knew who I was, and every forum had a big long thread about me—I showed up on Slashdot, and all of these things. Suddenly, I’m very much in the focus and I found that I couldn’t spend as much time on these forums, because if I did, all I wanted to do was argue with people, or sometimes just discuss and have good discussions, but I found that suddenly since it’s about me it was so much more personal that it was very hard to let go of the web forums. So I just had to cut off ties to them, because otherwise I could spend all day just talking with the people who are posting on these threads.
And so that level of awareness, it is kind of surreal. I’ve actually been recognized on the street, in a city. I went to San Diego, randomly, and someone recognized me and said: “Are you Brandon Sanderson?” That’s bizarre! They weren’t there for my signings, they didn’t know I was in town; they just passed me on the street!
So it is a little bit bizarre—now of course, as writers, we don’t ever get really famous. Maybe once every couple of years someone will recognize me in the street, so it’s not like I’m really a celebrity or anything, but it’s still weird, and odd, to be able to post on a forum and people know who I am.
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