I love all the books first off, but this question is for Harriet. Harriet, how did you find and believe that Brandon could be the guy to bring it all back and finish this fantastic world?
A friend from Minneapolis was visiting me in the week of Robert Jordan’s funeral, and she came up to me—I was sitting at the dinner table [?]—and she said “You need to read this.” It was Brandon’s eulogy for Robert Jordan which he had posted online, and Elise Mattheson is her name, and Elise knows that I am something of Luddite, so she couldn’t just say, “Here’s a good link.” [laughter] If she put it in front of me on paper, I would read it. And I thought, my goodness, this is just the feeling for Robert Jordan’s work, that I would like to see in anyone who was going to finish the books.
So then I called Tom Doherty, who is of course the publisher of Brandon’s own individual works, and said, “What do you think?” And since he’s a publisher, he began telling me sales figures. [laughter] And I had no particular interest, and I said, “Would you send me one of his books, please?” And he said, “Yeah, I’ll send you Mistborn; Elantris is a good book, but it’s a first novel—if any of you are in the industry, you know first novels are misleading; you have to look at something later—so I read the first forty-seven pages of this book, and it was a period of enormous stress, and I should say that, as a professional editor, if I’m reading a book, and I want to go to sleep, I can’t do it until I know the story is in good hands. Otherwise I’m going to keep reading it until I throw the book across the room and say “This is lousy.” [laughter]
Anyway, I fell asleep after forty-seven pages, not because I was bored, but because it was good . And when I woke up, the world, the characters, the conflict, even what they ate—everything was clear. And I said to myself, “This guy can do it.” So I called Tom, and said, “I think this guy can do it.” And he said, “You don’t think you ought to read the whole book?” [laughter] It was a pretty important decision. And I said, “If I were asking him to write a Brandon Sanderson novel, then I would have to read the whole book, but I’m not.” [laughter] “I’m asking him to write a Robert Jordan.” And that’s how it began.
And then…[?] and I thought, “Well, Brandon Sanderson in Provo, Utah…how many can there be?” So I called Information and got a woman on the phone, and I said, “This is Brandon Sanderson?” and she said yes. And I said, “Hi, my name is Harriet McDougal; I’m Robert Jordan’s widow, and I’m wondering whether your husband would have interest…” And she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about…Books?” It wasn’t the same Brandon Sanderson. [laughter] So then I called Tor, and said, “What’s Brandon’s number?” That was how it started. [laughter, applause]
That Brandon was actually a wrestler, like a high school or college wrestler. Not a pro wrestler, you know, an actual wrestler. And people always asked me if I was him when I was first published. And now I hear they all ask him if he’s me. [laughter]
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