How long did you have to think about it before taking on Wheel of Time?
I didn’t know I was being considered. I got a voicemail, which was nice because I didn’t get it cold. It was Robert Jordan’s widow asking me to call her. I couldn’t get a hold of her for a couple of hours, so I had time to think! I was prepared, so when she asked me, I said yes. I still could barely get the words out. I was so starstruck talking to her and so befuddled that the next day I wrote her an email saying, ‘Dear Harriet, I promise I’m not an idiot.’ I do remember sitting that night and having… not a panic attack, but the realization that if I mess this up, I am messing up a story beloved by millions. A piece of me started to acknowledge, ‘The Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan’s, and I cannot do what he would do’. What I am doing shouldn’t have to be done; he should be here to write it the way he wants to do it. There’s no way to do it right! I’m setting myself up for failure. That almost made me say I shouldn’t do this.
A writer friend called me and said I was crazy. ‘Whatever you do right, they’ll say Robert Jordan did, and whatever goes wrong you’ll get the blame. But I started reading Eye of the World when I was 14, in 1990, and those characters became my high-school buddies, and I’m still in touch with them. If someone else took it and did a poor job with it that would be partially my fault for saying no! I realized that if somebody is going to do this who isn’t Robert Jordan, I wanted the shot because I am a fan and I won’t screw it up too much.
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