I don’t know if you remember me, but I was a Stormleader for The Gathering Storm …
Thank you.
…and I got that first RAFO part, which was then answered in this book. And I was wondering if that question that I gave to Robert Jordan so many years ago, and he gave that wonderful answer, was the reason [?] or was it…[?]
(laughs) You’re dog girl . Yes, you are! I will say…there’s an inside joke here. Once, this wonderful young woman asked Robert Jordan what would happen if you balefired yourself through a gateway, and what exactly did he say?
He said, “Young woman, I need you to go have an affair—with man, woman, or German Shepherd; it doesn’t matter. Either way, you need to get a life.” (laughter, applause)
Now, I, uh…(laughter continues)
I also happened to then, several years later, marry a man who also read, and this is our daughter Aviendha.
Awwww! (applause)
See…[?]. (laughter)
I don’t have one either, and I’m worried…my big question was always about gateways, and when I began reading the series, as soon as I discovered them, I started to think about what would happen, cause I’m a magic system guy, right? And I’m like, “Oooh, what could you do with this? What could you do with this?” In fact, I started taking notes on what I could do, and they sat there in my notes file for years and years because I eventually started moving away from things I had seen done by other authors, and that meant, specifically the few things I was most interested in in the Wheel of Time. I didn’t end up ever writing a magic system using. gateways and the World of Dreams, the way Robert Jordan had it. I avoided these things intentionally. And yet I had all these notes of things that I would like to have done, if I ever did a magic system with them.
Lo and behold, I got that opportunity, and so I found ways to….when I got the project, I didn’t want to come in and make any sweeping changes—that wasn’t my goal—but there are some places where I felt it appropriate to add some of my touch to the books, and one was with the gateways. I didn’t want to be spending a lot of time doing anything with the magic system, you know—inventing a lot of new weaves, or anything like that—but I did want to expand some parts.
And so I actually….I went to Charleston, and we needed a new viewpoint character, specifically someone in the Black Tower—we hadn’t had…we didn’t have the right viewpoint character for the Black Tower—so I said, is there an Asha’man you guys think that I could take over, so to speak, and really flesh out and make into a more…you know, elevate a side character to a medium level character, which is something Robert Jordan frequently did in the series, and they came to the decision that Androl was the person that I should take, and I gave him the gateway Talent because I wanted to explore what happens with gateways.
And so, right there….we are all on the same wavelength; it wasn’t necessarily me trying to answer your question. It was me answering questions to myself as a young man reading the series, wondering a lot about gateways. And so, Androl was a lot of fun.
In fact, there’s another story there. At one point, I’m working on the series, and I get in the mail this envelope—it’s a manila envelope from Charleston, and in it are a bunch of photocopied pages, and Harriet has written on the front of them: “Jim planned to use this somewhere. Can you fit it in?” And what it was was a detailed explanation from the viewpoint of a leatherworker about how one goes about using leather, and leatherworking. And this is the sort of detail, craftsman-style sort of things that Robert Jordan really liked to find places for that sort of detail in the books, and meanwhile, I’ve been sitting here trying to build a character for Androl, and I’m like, “Okay! I’ve got a place for it.” And that’s how Androl became a leatherworker, is from that stack of pages from Robert Jordan; it was just a photocopy of a leatherworker talking about their work.
So, there’s some Androl stories. And so the answer is, it’s half to you, but it’s mostly to me (laughter). It’s to both of us.
Kathy met her husband at