You know, that’s a very interesting point. And I think it’s one of those things…I remember when I first started working on some Star Wars comics, and I’ll just use this as a preface to get you to comment. I was talking with Ryder Windham who was editor at Dark Horse at the time, and we were talking about a variety of projects. And one of the things that he said is that he really didn’t like hiring fans to write projects. He would rather take a writer and turn them into a fan to work on the project than it was to take a fan and try and train him to be a writer. Do you think the fact that you’ve got your writing chops, the fact that you’ve got your own books that are very well received and beloved, gives you the confidence to be able to sit there and say, okay now I get to play with this stuff that without which I wouldn’t have gotten where I was?
Confidence, I don’t know. I’m still sometimes—you know how it is—I mean, you worry. This sort of story is more beholden to the fans than it is to me. I don’t own it. It’s really theirs now, they’ve been following it for so long. But yeah, it certainly did have something to do with it.
I talk of it this way when I speak to Wheel of Time readers. I say, imagine a Venn diagram, all right. You’ve got this one circle that are just super huge Wheel of Time fans. And there are a lot of them out there, and I’ll tell you, though I’m in that circle, I am not the biggest fan that exists. I have not dedicated hours and hours of my life to creating web sites dedicated to the Wheel of Time. I make heavy use of those web sites when I’m doing research and working on the books. But I haven’t done that. There are people…if you would have found me before this happened, yes, I’d read all the books, in fact, I’d read most of them numerous times. But if you started firing trivia questions at me, you would have found very quickly that I would have hummed and hawed quite a bit. There are certainly larger fans.
And if you make another circle to the side of really great writers, I hope that I would be in that circle, but I’m not going to be the best writer you’ll find by far. I mean, I’m in awe of some of the other writers in the fantasy community. George R. R. Martin, people like Terry Pratchett, are just pure geniuses and certainly are fantastic writers.
But if you put those two circles together, sitting right smack dab in the middle of pretty big Wheel of Time fans and pretty decent writers, is me. And I think that’s what they were looking for, what Harriet was looking for, when choosing someone to work on this project. The Wheel of Time—eleven books plus prequel—there’s a lot of material there and they needed a book out fairly quickly, and so they needed somebody who was familiar with it already. But at the same time, if you just had a fan—like you said, learning to write is a process that can take decades, it certainly takes years and years to write well—and they didn’t have that time to train somebody to write that well. And so I kind of look at myself, and say well, in some ways it’s amazing and somewhat strange to me that I got chosen. But in other ways, it’s like I am the only person sitting there in the middle between those two circles, and so I was in some ways the only choice.
Very well said, actually.
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