The week after my husband’s funeral, a friend was staying with me. She’d come down for the service, and she, as so many people are, was both a fan of fantasy and heavily into the net. And she put a printout in front of me—the basic sort of semi-Luddite—and said, you need to read this. And it was the eulogy that Brandon had written and posted on his website. And I read it and thought, gosh, that’s just beautiful. And it’s also the feeling for my husband’s work that I would love to see in whoever takes over to finish the series, because in his last weeks and months, my husband had made it very clear to me that he did want the series finished. I draw a distinction—he had a horror of sharecropping, the endless work of other writers in a world that someone has created. He really had a horror of that, so that’s not going to happen. But he really did want the series finished.
He began one Saturday night. His cousin—a cousin named Wilson Grooms, who was as close to him as a brother—was visiting. And I had a friend there, thank God, who’d once been a court reporter. And I was scrabbling round in the kitchen making food or something, and Jim . . . who’s read the book? Who’s not read the book?
The last one? Who hasn’t finished the last one?
Well, okay.
No spoilers, then.
Well, okay. My husband, called Jim, began to talk and he said, there’s a blank in the blank that nobody knows about, not even Harriet. And he was off and running. And the court reporter was there, fortunately, because I was trying to take notes, and instead I was just staring at him in rapture, kind of. And Wilson went out at midnight and bought a tape recorder, and that was the start of a real outpouring of what he wanted in the rest of the series. That’s how I knew he wanted it finished. Otherwise, he’d have kept his mouth shut. Which was not very much in his nature.
[laughter]
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