I think he’d only actually written two Conans when he decided to write The Wheel of Time. We talked about it a lot in ‘83. I remember talking about it quite a bit before we did the contract in ‘84. I thought The Fallon Blood was going to be a standalone and that there was only going to be the one book on the Southern sweep of history. It ended up being three. We began talking about an epic fantasy: one book, then maybe three books like The Lord of the Rings. I just didn’t believe it would get done in three books, because by then I knew how Jim liked to tell a story. So we did the contract in early ‘84. He was doing Conan books well beyond when we began talking about that in ‘83. When did the first Conan book ship? ‘81?
Oh, I don’t remember. Maybe the movie you were hoping to plan your timing around was the second Conan movie?
I think it was. I think it was later because we were already pretty far along in the planning of The Wheel of Time, and this was related. It just seemed natural for him to be doing that, too.
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