For Brandon, you have a career on your own as an author….
Yes.
Since you’ve had this other career—which has helped, I’m sure, in a lot of ways—what impact has this been on your original writing career, I mean I know you had to have slowed down your progress and your series, but you’ve still been writing those. What are the biggest impacts you’ve seen on your writing career because of taking on the Wheel of Time?
It’s definitely done some…it’s made me have to put down projects. In fact, next year, I have coming out the projects I was working on in 2007 when this came my way; The Rithmatist and Steelheart are both books that I did way back then that I didn’t feel that I was able to release in the middle of the Wheel of Time books, even though I had them done, because I wouldn’t have been able to do the revisions on them, and because I wouldn’t be able to support them; I wouldn’t be able to do sequels and things like that. They’re both YA books. And that’s, you know…when I accepted this, I said “Okay, I’m shelving these things.” I did get to do a couple of books, I got to do The Way of Kings , which, granted, I already had a draft of that done. So really, the only book in these last years, the last five years that I’ve been doing this, that I’ve written from scratch and released was Alloy of Law . And so it’s going to…it did kind of slow me down. The only reason it didn’t slow me down as much as it could have was because I had all of this stuff done already. I had a great big backlog of books, because I enjoy writing, and I’ve been writing for years, and back then I wasn’t as popular as I am now, so Tor would put things in slots later on, like…while I’ve been working on these, Warbreaker and Mistborn 3 came out, both of which were done years before I was offered the Wheel of Time. And so…yeah, all of this stuff that I had been working on long ago got delayed, and that was just fine—I went into this eyes open—but it is going to be nice to be able to go back to these things and give them some of the support that I’ve wanted all along.
You know, this project took more time than all of us expected it to. I had to say yes sight unseen to knowing how big it was. I knew what Jim had said, but I didn’t know how much of it was done. I didn’t know that we had two hundred pages out of two thousand. There was no way for me to know how much would need to be done. So yeah, it’s been a big long deviation, but not a distraction, because I think my writing has grown by leaps and bounds. It’s kind of like I had to go pump iron, because writing in the Wheel of Time has been much harder than writing on anything else I’ve done, and I have been forced to grow, and you can see my being forced to grow between the books in the Wheel of Time books. I think my writing is way better in Towers of Midnight than it was in The Gathering Storm , particularly in some of the ways that that Jim was strong. And so, I think that’s helped me. It’s certainly not an experience that I would trade for anything. I got to read the ending in 2007, so there’s that. (laughter) But yeah, it’s been a wonderful experience, but boy, it’s been a big, big, big deviation. It’s not where I thought my career would go at all.
Was it daunting seeing just that small amount of work that was taken care of before you stepped on?
Well, it’s daunting in two ways: First, I got that. It was really nice to have the ending. Like, having the prologue and the ending basically done—those were the two things that he did the most work on—meant that I had the bookends, which is how I build an outline anyway. I know where I start, I know my ending, and I build an outline out of that. But at the same time, there’s three million words of notes about the series, which is daunting in another way. Yes, there’s two hundred pages of work done on the book, and then there’s this stack over here of all these other notes that include all of these things that are just mind-boggling, the stuff that’s in there. We released a few of them last year for you guys. Was it last year that we released the notes?
Yeah, we got the page on Cadsuane and…
Yeah, the page on Cadsuane and stuff like that. You just see all of weird things that he had in his notes. I have all the same sort of weird stuff in my notes about like Stormlight and stuff, but it’s just fun to see. You go pore through these notes…he has the most random stuff. Lists of trees, lists of people, lists of this, and just millions and millions and words of this stuff, more than I can keep track of at all. It requires Maria and Alan to keep track of all this stuff. So it was also daunting in that, yes there are two hundred pages written, which actually nice, because as I’ve said before, if the book had been 80% of the way done, they wouldn’t have needed to hire me, they wouldn’t have needed to bring me in. When a book is 80% of the way done, that’s when you get a ghostwriter, or Harriet just does it herself. She really could have done it in-house herself and finished that and said “Look, here we’re going to do a few patches and stuff, but the book is mostly done.”
And so, getting there and saying “Hey, I actually get to do something with this, I have an opportunity to add the scenes that I’ve been wanting as a fan for years and years, so I get a chance to actually write these characters, rather than coming in and just patching some holes,” was very thrilling for me at the same time. You know, I worried that I would get there and it would just be patching holes—”Write these five scenes,” or something like that—and that would have meant I wouldn’t have really had a part in it. Granted, that would have been better, because it would have meant there was more Jim in it, and it would have made a better book, but at the same time, when I got to see those two hundred pages, I was saddened but excited at the same time.
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