My name is Sarah Wilby, and I’m from here. Actually, I started going to this high school about the time the books came out. So I think this is probably the coolest event that has ever happened in this entire building, what’s happening tonight. [laughter]
My question is—for Harriet—you said Robert Jordan had an engineering job with the government before he started writing books. How heavily did you try to dissuade him from giving that up to write this…this crazy fantasy stuff, because I remember what fantasy books were like at the time these started coming out, and I mean, this changed everything—there was nothing at this level—so he was doing something very, very different.
I didn’t know him when he quit to start writing. I met him, I guess a year or possibly two after he had stopped, and gave him the second contract he had been offered. The first was a contract given to him by DAW books, the little skinny ones with the yellow spine? And then the contract came with this nice, long letter from Donald Wollheim, the publisher. And he wrote back—he’d been taking a course in Business Law at the College of Charleston—and said, “Oh, I’m so glad to have your offer, but could I have a little more than five percent of the movie rights?” [laughter] Or something like that. And Wollheim wrote back a one-line letter: “In view of your contract attitude, I withdraw my offer.” [laughter] But he was an optimist, and at that, rather madly, and chose to remember that on his first submission he’d gotten an offer, rather than “the son-of-a-gun withdrew the offer, and I will therefore be discouraged.”
So I gave him what was a contract for his first published book, which was a historical novel called The Fallon Blood . And then, Doherty wanted somebody to write a Conan novel, after three Fallons, and distribution was drying up on the third book. And I said, well, because of this Wollheim rejection, I knew that Jim could write a Conan, and he said, “I don’t want to do that.” And three weeks later, I hadn’t thought of anybody else, and I said [with pout] “Please!” With the lip…and he said, “Don’t wiggle that thing at me, Harriet!” [laughter] So he did, and he liked it so much he did seven.
And so…I mean it was long after his quitting his job that this began, and I had nothing to do with that. [laughter] Except that, in the middle of all this, it looked as if my imprint—which had published his first thing and all—was going to go belly-up, and I was in the yard pulling wild onions, which is what I do in moments of insane stress, cause you never get rid of wild onions—it’s impossible—and I was out there pulling these things up, saying “I can’t go back to New York; I can’t get a job; I’m in my f—” I guess I was forty. Anyway, “I’m forty; I’m too old!” You can’t climb the corporate ladder after that. And he said, “Harriet, I can’t go back to being an engineer for the Navy now that I’ve been writing Conan the Barbarian. Do you think they’ll let me anywhere near their nuclear subs?” [laughter] And I looked up at him, and I laughed, and I said, “I guess not; we’re both doomed!” [laughter]
Thank you very much, all of you.
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