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Interview #989: Brandon Sanderson and Harriet McDougal at Microsoft Research, Entry #12

Brandon Sanderson

Okay, will you come up and use the mic? Because then the people who are listening can hear what you have to say. They’re sitting at their cubicles furiously producing new Microsoft Word products for me to write books with, so . . .

Question

It’s a short question. Did you ever finish the book?

Harriet McDougal

No. [laughs] But I’ve read . . .

Question

It was a tease. That’s why I thought it was. Because you didn’t say you did or did not. But you read 47 pages, but you didn’t finish it, right?

Harriet McDougal

No.

Question

And still have not?

Harriet McDougal

But how many pages of Brandon Sanderson have I read now? [laughs]

Brandon Sanderson

It was very interesting working with Harriet during that first year. She’s talked about this a little, but she considered getting somebody working on the book to be like a dying request of Robert Jordan’s. And once she found me and gave me the stuff, she basically disappeared for a year. And if any of you have lost someone dear to you, you might understand why that was.

I worked for a year basically in seclusion, getting all the notes ready and working on the outline and things, and it wasn’t until after that year that Harriet came on board. And you know, she’s an editor, and she needs something to work on, done, before . . . So she left me with it for that year, and grieved. And then, that next year is when we worked on Gathering Storm , after I had worked on some prose and things.

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