My name is Derek Cohen, and I’m from Provo, Utah. My question is for Harriet. After Jim died, of course, you’re going through all of these authors, and there’s so many authors in the fantasy and even science fiction genres that could have taken the step. But was there an “Aha!” moment, or…what was it that made you say to yourself, “This guy is the one”?
The first thing that led me to Brandon was the very beautiful eulogy he wrote for Robert Jordan on his website, and I don’t hang out on the net, because I figure I can either do that or have a productive life. [cheers, applause] But a friend who likes to hang out on the net saw the eulogy, printed it out, and said “You need to read this,” and I certainly did. And I thought, “This is the spirit that I very much want in the writer who will finish the series.”
At the same time, another writer—a perfectly good writer who has a decent reputation—had had his agent call Robert Jordan’s agent. Do you see the difference? But then what really…I had not read Brandon, and I called Tom Doherty—I was originally…I was the original editorial director of Tor, so my relationship with with Tom Doherty goes back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth [laughter]—and I asked him for a book, and he said, “Well, don’t take Elantris ; that’s a first novel. I’ll send you Mistborn [ The Final Empire ].”
And he did, and I read forty-seven pages of it, and I fell asleep! Which is not… [laughter, applause] Wait! There’s a thing you should know about professional editors, or at least this one. I cannot go to sleep while the story’s in trouble; I have to keep reading until I see that the story is in good hands. And I was also exhausted. [laughter] So anyway, I woke up, and the story, the planet, the situation—even what they were eating—it was all clear, and I said, “Yeah, he can do it.” And Tom Doherty said, “Well, don’t you think you should read the whole book? It’s an important decision.” And I said, “It would be very important if I were hiring him to write a Brandon Sanderson novel, but I’m hiring him to write a Robert Jordan, and he can do it!” So, that’s how it came about. [applause]
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