One of the things that…okay, blasphemy: I’ve only read through the series once.
At least you’ve read through it once… Jimmy .
Yeah, Jimmy!
Anyway, in some of these later books, one of the biggest issues that I had was when the timeline got fractured, and there was a period of time when I was fully convinced that there was a Darkfriend impersonating Tam. It just had me really confused. What lessons did you learn from that experience as you’re gonna carry forward into your future writing?
The timeline fracture in Towers of Midnight came because of the book split, and what needed to go in one book, had to go in…you know, and things like that, and after the fact of releasing The Gathering Storm , we had Towers of Midnight sitting there, and I hadn’t finished Towers of Midnight completely, I’d written like…I’d basically, when we split it, I’d written one…like, Perrin almost all the way through, but not other sequences all the way through and things, and we released The Gathering Storm , and we had to like fix things in The Gathering Storm , when we were getting in that, we realized, “Oh no…” I mean, the timeline is fine, but it means that Tam has to jump back in time. And this was going to be a bit of a challenge even if the book were whole, because Robert Jordan had them off of time with one another at the start of The Gathering Storm ; Perrin was several months behind everyone else. And so, once you start bringing people back together, you either had to…we either had to do some things like walls fall on them, which was famously how Jim got Mat back in sync with everybody else, when he’d been behind, is a wall fell on him, and then he left him for several months for him to heal, and then we come back, and Mat’s like, “Man, I hated having that wall fall on me!” (laughter)
“Good thing that was three months ago; I’m better now!”
Yeah. And that was the way that Robert Jordan, since people get off track from each other…some of the things you kind of have to do. I had to get Perrin stuck in the mud for a while. (laughter) Yeah. And this is just to get everyone synced up, and the Tam sync-up, as a writer, I think what I learned is, I think of timelines a little differently. Like I, being deep in the series and working on it, I knew where everyone was, and I’m like, “Everyone will know that we’re flashing back to Perrin here.” But of course not everyone knows that; they’re not all following the timeline; they don’t know that we’re starting this book two months before The Gathering Storm ended, so to bring them back on track, that’s why Tam ended up in two places at once, because he wasn’t in two places at once; they were off track from one another, time-wise. And I guess I would just take more consideration of the fact that not everyone is steeped in the timelines like I am, and knowing where everyone is, and things like that, and I would have tried to find a better cue for the fact that we’ve jumped backward in time.
“Three months earlier…”
Yes. “Three months ago…”
“…back when dinosaurs ruled the earth…”
Mmhmm.
Jimmy is Jenn’s husband; he helps her run cons.
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