A compliment to you, Harriet and the entire team that put this together, but the really stunning thing about the last book was how many characters had a role in this book, down to multiple dozens of people, secondary characters and below. How did one do that? How does one create that continuity? Obviously some of it comes from Jordan’s original work, but how does one pull that all together?
Someone in the audience said “magic”. I don’t know that there’s a better answer.
It was the biggest challenge of this last book. I’ve said for years, even before I was involved in the project, once you hit book seven in the Wheel of Time as a reader, you have to realize something that I realized. The series itself is not about Rand. The series is about all of these people facing the end of the world. Rand of course is at the center, and there are other figures close to the center, but the series is about all of these people. And going into the last book we all felt that the last book needed to evoke that. Rand needed to be the heart, but it needed to be about the world, all of these people facing the end of times. That was something we struggled with, went back and forth on. The creative process is a mysterious thing, even to us involved. I’m glad that you felt that, because when I went into it that was one of the things I said, this is what we need to do, it needs to feel like this, and if we are successful, that’s what it will feel like.
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