The other thing that I would mention is I do have another book coming up this year other than the Wheel of Time book, which is called The Way of Kings . Which is very interesting in that…working on the Wheel of Time has taught me a whole lot about writing, and there is a book I had been working on of my own for about ten years now that hadn’t ever worked. I hadn’t been able to get it right. And after writing The Gathering Storm , the first of the Wheel of Time books, the changes it required in me as a writer started to make things click. And so last summer, I went and I took several months off from the Wheel of Time and I did a revision—actually, a complete rewrite, a start from scratch—on this book, which is the start of a large epic of my own. And it finally worked, it all came together. And so Tor is publishing that novel in August—August 17th— The Way of Kings , which, you know, I’m very excited about. It’s something that’s been part of my life for a very long time, and it’s now working, and everything is coming together. So I’m quite excited about it.
Excellent, excellent.
Did I say I’m excited about it?
Yes, you sound excited. You definitely sound excited. So, did you ever expect your career to get to this point, or by this route, when you were first starting out?
Not at all, not at all. I mean, these are the sorts of things you can’t anticipate. When you’re first starting out, at least for me…I actually wrote thirteen novels before I got published. Coincidentally, the thirteenth of those novels was The Way of Kings , the first version of it. I sold book number six, which was Elantris . Which actually…you guys had me on about a month after Elantris came out. I think it was one of my very first interviews. I sold my sixth book. And you know, during that time, publishing alone becomes this mythological thing that you’re not sure if it will ever even happen. The fact that that happened, and now I’ve had this incredible success and been able to be part of a fantasy series that’s been dear to me for so many years, I mean, this is the sort of stuff that if I were to write this sort of thing happening to a character in a book, no one would believe it even in a fantasy novel.
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