Date: 1996-06-27
Type: Verbatim
Mr. Jordan. were you rushed by publisher deadlines?
In a way. Not with the last book, certainly but The Eye of the World took four years to write. Each of the other books took 13 or 14 months but the publisher brought out the second book 10 months after the first and the following books at 12-month intervals. You can see there’s a law of diminishing returns there. For this last book, I simply told them I could not do it again. A Crown of Swords took about 20 months to write, in fact. That’s why the book didn’t come out last fall or earlier in the spring.
What did you think about those folks arguing with you about YOUR characters?
Well, I’m sort of used to it. It’s been going on for a long time now.
ADMIT IT!!!!!! DASHIVA IS OSAN’GAR111111
On the advice of my lawyer, I never admit anything. :) Not even to my wife!
How old where you when you started writing?
I was 30 when I started writing. Maybe 29. I’d have to sit down and figure it out. It was a while ago.
Mr. Jordan, any idea who will be doing the art for the companion book?
An artist named Todd Hamilton is doing the work for the illustrated guide.
Mr. Jordan? If I may? How did you develop the language?
The words come partly from Gaelic, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese. The grammar and syntax I believe I invented myself although it’s possible that another language uses the same. Of course, just as with English, I have deliberately put in some very illogical inconsistencies.
MR. JORDAN: Do you realize what you are putting us through with the time between books?
You guys get to sit around with your feet up between books! :) I bust my hump writing them.
And also is the Dark One the only source of the True Power?
Yes, the Dark One is the only source of the True Power.
How difficult is it to get a major publisher like TOR to publish a novel, Mr. Jordan?
I forgot who asked this, but it wasn’t difficult to get Tor to publish my first novel. Tom Doherty liked what I write. I’ve been writing for 20 years and I told him that I had an idea for a multi-volume book. I didn’t know how many books and probably any other publishers would have thrown me out of his office but Tom said OK!
Mr Jordan, do you have any personal thoughts about people Role Playing in the world you have given us?
I have a standard letter that I send to people when they ask for permission to do role-playing, in which I grant them very limited permission to do this. It says, in effect, that you have permission to do it in this instance as long as you don’t try to make a profit off of it.
I’m afraid I need to go now. Thanks to everyone for your interest!
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.