Date: 2011-07-16
Type: Paraphrased
Location: Toronto, ON
Reporter: herid
I went to the signing and to the Q&A session with Brandon Sanderson today at the Polaris convention in Toronto. He didn’t reveal anything major but he did say a few interesting things.
He said that up until the last few weeks of his life RJ didn’t want anybody to finish the books in case he died and even wanted all the notes, outlines etc destroyed. He only changed his mind a few weeks before his death. I suspect he mentioned this in prior interviews but this was the first I’ve heard about it myself.
He said that the scene with the Borderlander farmers in The Gathering Storm prologue and the one with the Borderlander Watch Tower in the Towers of Midnight prologue were written by RJ and that they were some of the last complete scenes RJ wrote (he mentioned this in earlier interviews).
He refused to say who wrote “The Last That Could Be Done” from The Gathering Storm .
He wrote the scenes of Egwene’s dinners with Elaida in The Gathering Storm . RJ’s notes suggested just one dinner scene but BS decided that it would work better if it was split in two.
Brandon said at a signing that he did write “The Last that Could Be Done” (which is chapter 22 of The Gathering Storm ). He might have started with something RJ wrote, but it’s not likely, as he has indicated that most of what RJ did in this book was in the prologue and in the Egwene bits.
He confirmed the mythology connection to Perrin being wounded in the leg in the fight with Slayer in Towers of Midnight that was suggested by Hael Me in this thread .
I asked him whether the second method to destroy cuendillar (the first is True Power) can be figured out based on available info and the laws of the world of WoT.
He said he doesn’t think so but that the method is such that when/if we see it we should feel that it does conform to the rules of the WoT universe. Unfortunately, I can’t recall his exact wording but I don’t think the way he said implied that we would definitely see it happen.
Brandon said that the second way to destroy cuendillar is by weakening the Pattern. (The first way is with the True Power, as we saw in The Gathering Storm .
I asked about Galad and his parallels with Mordred that I discussed here .
He started nodding before I finished describing the parallels and said that yes, he was aware of those. But he of course didn’t say anything specific about how exactly this might play out. He did say that he has much less freedom with Galad than with some other characters as Galad’s plotline was mapped out in detail by RJ.
I also asked him again ( Terez asked him about it on my behalf before ) about why Taim when he first shows up in Lord of Chaos says that he shaved because of the heat, yet it’s mentioned twice in that very scene that he is not sweating and he later teaches Rand the antisweating trick and tells him that it works so well that Rand would soon be able to completely ignore even extreme heat and cold. I discuss this in detail in my blog as I believe it proves that Taim is an impostor.
He said that this issue is not discussed in the notes and he missed it himself previously so the best he can say is that this is meant to show that Taim is a suspicious character who is not to be trusted.
This doesn’t exactly lend support to my theory but I don’t think it contradicts it either. I didn’t ask him if this proves that Taim is an impostor as he’d RAFO that.
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