Okay. One of the—probably the last question that was brought was, how has your own…have you placed your own footprint, or fingerprint, on the Wheel of Time? And I think you brought it up here, in this last panel about worldbuilding, with the cannons .
My goal in the Wheel of Time was not to put my own fingerprint on it. I wanted to finish Robert Jordan’s series as close to the soul of the series as he would do, and yet I realized as part of the process quickly that I couldn’t imitate him, and that I would have to make it a little bit my own—it would have to be a collaboration—and that’s a necessary evil. I really do wish that Robert Jordan were here to finish the books the way that they should have been finished, but there are certain things that he does that I can’t do. For instance, he was in Vietnam. He was a soldier. He understood battle in a way that I never will. I instead have watched a whole lot of Hong Kong action films, you know, things like that, and so the way I approach an action sequence is very different from him, and the way I look at magic is a little bit different from the way he looked at magic. That’s one thing that is different [between] us. So, the action sequences, things like that. My goal has been to make the characters still feel like themselves, but you will see my fingerprint on things: the way I treat some of the worldbuilding and the action sequences are the two big ones.
Okay, great.
The link for cannons is from DragonCon a few months later, but it’s probably safe to assume Phillip was talking about something along the same lines.
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