We’ve been talking a lot about our big projects, Wise Man’s Fear and Way of Kings , and do you have any other side projects? Because I loved your children’s book—in fact, for a fun story for those reading this: We got in a big argument in my writing group about the meaning of Pat’s children’s book and what was really happening behind the scenes. So I used a little bit of colleague privilege and called him on the phone to ask him his interpretation. And he was very much an author in that he said, well, it could mean this, it could mean that—he gave a very good answer where he gave us some of what the writer was thinking but left it open to personal interpretation.
Do you have any other projects like the children’s book? Are we going to be seeing anything small between Wise Man’s Fear and the third book?
Yeah. I’m absolutely going to doing some other smaller projects while I’m working on the third book. I loved writing The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle . It was fun. It didn’t steal time away from working on my novel, it reminded me why I write in the first place.
I already have plans for the sequel to that book. I’ve got plans for a few short stories, too.
I also take time off after I finish a huge book to work on experimental side projects and recharge my creative energy. Sometimes these projects go somewhere, and sometimes they don’t. Last year after finishing Towers of Midnight I took some time to work on an urban fantasy, and though I got over halfway through it there was just something that wasn’t working, so I set it aside.
Then I started what was going to be a Mistborn short story, and once I was a few scenes in, it was really clicking. It ended up turning into a short (for me) novel that I’m very happy with. Tor was also pleased to hear about it since they weren’t going to have a book to release from me in 2011, but now Mistborn: The Alloy of Law will come out in November. And now my writing battery is all charged up to start working on the Wheel of Time again.
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