Hi. I’m Zach [?], and I’m from here in Orem, and I kind of feel like a child with all these people that have read it for so long. I’m pretty new to the series—just a couple of years—but I love it just as much. And I’m really grateful you guys brought your assistants with you as well, because I know, with the creative writing process and writing, it takes a lot more than just one person.
And so I was wondering, probably more directed to Brandon, how did you keep everything together? How did you encompass everything… [laughter] Just a little idea; I just wanted to know a little bit about how you kept up with everything.
It’s interesting. I am somewhat absentminded in a lot of things in my life, but I don’t forget stories. Stories stay in my head, and perhaps that’s why I forget everything else. [laughter] I can remember stories that I was planning to tell twenty years ago, and I’ve still got the details in my head, and I’m ready to write it at some point; I just haven’t gotten around to it.
That said, a lot of the minutiae that isn’t part of the soul of the story to me—it’s very important, but it isn’t part of the soul of the story—and that sort of thing, I do need to keep track of, and so recently we’ve been using the Wiki, and the Wiki has worked really well; that’s for my own books. For the Wheel of Time, I just let other people make the Wikis, and I use theirs. [laughter] So the Encyclopaedia-WoT —Bob Kluttz, and Encyclopaedia-WoT—and if there’s anyone here from Tar Valon who worked on their Wiki, the Tar Valon Wiki is fantastic, and I really liked the Tar Valon Wiki. And so, those were two things that I used for the simple questions, the questions they couldn’t answer. Maria was like our version of the Brown Ajah that has been gathering all sorts of things and getting them ready for us whenever we have requests about them and whatnot, so it’s been very useful.
She doesn’t have a live owl on her desk, but she does have a large plastic iguana that has a cigarette in its mouth. [laughter]
And I have two beautiful brown shawls proving I am of the Brown Ajah. [cheers, applause]
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.