So tell me about how you chose Brandon Sanderson to finish the series.
Brandon Sanderson wrote a very beautiful eulogy for my husband on his web site. And a friend of mine was browsing around on the web, and saw it, printed it out—I’m not really a Luddite, but I’m computer resistant, you might say—and put it in front of me and said, “You really need to read this.” And it was just a beautiful eulogy, in which he said he’d been reading Jordan since his middle teens, that Jordan had inspired him to become a fantasy writer. I believe he said that one reason his characters stay in one spot is that he felt he could never do the ‘haring across the landscape’ kind of fantasy that Robert Jordan did any better than Robert Jordan had done it.
Anyway, he was very loving towards the series. And I called Tom Doherty—Brandon was being published by Tor and said that one reason he wanted Tor was that it was Robert Jordan’s publisher. So I got hold a copy of Mistborn , and spoke to Tom about his sales numbers, too. I was really tired and after I’d read about 47 pages, I fell asleep, which is no fault of the book—it was my exhaustion. When I woke up, the characters, the situation, the conflicts were all clear in my mind. And I thought, “Yeah, this guy can do it.” And I called Tom to tell him that was my opinion, and Tom said, “You don’t think you ought to read the whole book ? It’s an important decision.” And I said, “Well yes, if I were hiring him to write a Brandon Sanderson novel, but I’m not. I’m hiring him to write a Robert Jordan novel.” And we moused around a little bit, trying to think is there anybody that should be considered. And then after a while I called Brandon and said we were developing a short list—I didn’t tell him how short the list was—but would he be interested in being on it. And he said he would. And a couple of weeks go by, and then we said, “Okay, you’ve got it.”
And Brandon came east—he lives in Utah, but he came to Charleston—and I picked him up at the airport and brought him back to my house, and said, “Well, I have some soup for your supper.” He said, “What I’d really like is the end.” The end of the series—(laughs)—the material my husband had left. I said, “Okay. Here. Let me know when you’re ready for your soup.” So that’s how that started.
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