Yeah. Well, I caught Tom Doherty at a convention a couple years ago. He was alone, which doesn’t happen very often. So, I chatted to him a little bit about this. At that time it was one book, and he said, “Well, he’s actually written like close to 1,000 pages so far, and he’s only gotten like 1/3 into Jordan’s notes. So, we might have to split the book into two.” And then lo and behold, there’s going to be three books.
It’s an enormous amount of work and we feel that fans will enjoy it better, if we give it to them 1/3 at a time, for three years. As opposed to making them wait an extra three years and then get the whole thing.
Yeah. What happened was. . . and I want to make this perfectly clear as I try to explain this. I’ve not expanded the size of the book at all. Robert Jordan, before he passed away, kept saying, “This book is going to be enormous. This book is going to be huge. They’re going to have to sell a wagon with the bookstores, so you can get it out of the bookstore.” And I took that to heart and was writing it as I felt he would have written it. He wanted this book to be enormous.
And Tom Doherty and Harriet made the call, I left it up to them, that they were going to decide how it was going to be divided or if it was going to be divided or if they were going to be printing it as one. And what really happened is about January of this year, Tom and Harriet got together and they looked at what we had and they made the call for two reasons. One reason being, they felt that it was too large to publish as one book. Harriet had said to me, kind of in private, she said, “I don’t think Jim could have done this in one book.” I don’t think he was planning to do this in one book. He maybe would have tried to get them to publish it as one book, but the realities of the publishing business . . . the larger reason I think that they did it because it was going to take me another two years to finish that one book if we were going to be publishing it as one. And they didn’t feel that it was right to make the fans wait that long. It’s already been four years since the last Wheel of Time book.
And so the decision was made that they would take the first third, which I had finished already, and then have me work with it and edit it so that it was a single volume and it doesn’t read like the first third of a story. The way I approached writing this made for some very natural break points. And they were going to publish that and then we would publish the second third and the third third. And it’s really more about the fact that this just takes time. These things are enormously difficult to write, in a good way, but very, very hard, because of how much work it requires to get it right and how many pages there are. I mean the first third is going to be as long as an average Wheel of Time book.
Oh, yeah.
And so you can imagine stacking three copies of Eye of the World on top of each other; that’s how long Jim planned this book to be.
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