There was a signing table report on Reddit where you mentioned some research RJ had done on leatherworking, and how you worked it into Androl’s character. Anything else you can tell us about that?
I’m not sure what I can say here that will be all that interesting. While I was working on the outline for the book (what eventually became the books) Harriet found something she’d forgotten about until then. It was a photocopied stack of sheets from what appeared to be a magazine about craftsmanship. In it, a leatherworker went into depth about what he did in his art. Harriet had written across it “Jim planned to use this somewhere.” We didn’t know where.
Previously, in visiting Team Jordan, I’d suggested that I would enjoy having an Asha’man character who had previously been a side character that I could make into a main character. I wasn’t planning to add any other characters in significant roles, but I did want an Asha’man to add some viewpoints in the Black Tower. Beyond that, I wanted as a storyteller to have a character I could use that had very little baggage, one I could develop fresh. It’s something you will often find me doing in my own books, something Jim himself did, in expanding a side character in later books of a series.
They’d suggested Androl, who was basically a blank slate in the notes. I took him and made him my gateway-Talented Asha’man, and the leatherworking sequence seemed to work very well with how I’d been developing him. And that’s how the Androl of these later three books came to be.
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