Search the most comprehensive database of interviews and book signings from Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson and the rest of Team Jordan.
2012-04-30: I had the great pleasure of speaking with Harriet McDougal Rigney about her life. She's an amazing talent and person and it will take you less than an hour to agree.
2012-04-24: Some thoughts I had during JordanCon4 and the upcoming conclusion of "The Wheel of Time."
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Feb 1st, 2013
Paraphrased
Salt Lake City, UT
AMOL Book Tour
Weller Book Works
Deslya
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Hello everyone! Below is the report and Q&A from the Salt Lake City Signing!
Feb 1, 2013 was a rare sunny winter day in Salt Lake City when we assembled at Weller Book Works to meet Brandon Sanderson and more than 150 of his amazing fans. Brandon has often shared that the owners of this bookstore were so supportive in his early years as an author, before most Wheel of Time fans even knew his name, that it was terrific to have such a large crowd, especially with the Jan. 8 Midnight Release Party in Provo having happened only about 45 minutes away from Salt Lake.
The gathering crowd included people of all ages young and old. There were even infants and children hanging out—future fans, their parents called them. Soon the seating section was overflowing, and people started staking out spots in the mezzanine, the stairs, anywhere that they could get a good view of the as yet empty lectern bearing a wonderfully large poster of the Memory of Light cover.
We Memory Keepers handed out a variety of games and trivia to entertain the fans while they waited (some almost three hours) for their chance to get their book signed. Memory Keeper Marc T. went around taking photos of the whole event, many of which are here, the rest are soon to be in the Gallery. We shared 4 different sets of trivia questions, a quote match and a crossword (thanks Wetlander!). We thought we'd made a good sampling of easy and tough questions, and we were right about the tough ones—as we didn't see any (that I know of) completely correct answer sheets. But people tried and worked together and we gave them hints, and eventually we started seeing completed trivia come back. We gave out extra raffle tickets to anyone who turned in the sheets which meant some people ended up with lots of extra tickets for doing all that fun "work."
The crowd was nice and thick even before the scheduled start time of 7pm, so Memory Keeper Deb N. went around with an activity she created. People pulled out a random slip of paper which contained their WoT "profession." There were Gleemen and Aes Sedai, Atha'an Miere and Darkfriends—fans had a lot of fun finding out the role the Pattern wove for them.
Finally, after we Memory Keepers had a few private minutes with Brandon to get our own books signed, the man himself appeared to thunderous applause. He wore his signature leather jacket and looked surprisingly well rested considering he has a newborn at home! He jumped right in with the reading and Q&A which is included below as recorded by Memory Keeper Chris W.:
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Brandon started the event by reading the scene of Talmanes riding to the rescue of Caemlyn. He mentioned that he has always appreciated the relationship between Talmanes and Mat, and so he was excited to see so much from Talmanes in RJ's prologue. He said Talmanes' prologue appearance is one of his favorites.
He chose to read the Wind scene at the beginning of Chapter One as well, because the wind followed the route of the three ta'veren on their journey. It is a scene that is symbolic of the series, and very special to him just as it is to the fans.
After the short reading, we moved on to the Q&A.
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It was witnessed. That's it.
There was a little more to the question above, but I left it out of this log for two reasons: One, I had a really hard time keeping up with the person asking the question, not to mention Brandon trying to answer, plus the guy who asked the question broke the "no spoilers in the Q&A" rule.
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The Memory of Light tactics were the things I was most worried about getting right. RJ was more a military historian than me and he was a soldier, so we went looking for help. Harriet knows a man named Bernard Cornwell who writes a lot of military fiction, so he helped us, and Alan Romanczuk is a war historian, who was able to help us a lot. He built the battle plan for the entire war, as far as troop movements and the tactical portion of the Last Battle. Connecting them and making it meld into the story with the characters was my job. We went rounds about "this is tactically sound" or "no it's not", so Alan was a big help making it believable. I did research, but my feeling is that I can get to 70–80% of knowledge on a subject pretty quickly through a month or two of research, but getting that last 20% is something that takes 10 years of work. My goal is to get to 70–80, and then give it to someone who knows their stuff and have them help me from there.
The names of the people Brandon referenced here were probably butchered. I was just trying to keep up with him so I could record the main parts of his response instead of focusing on the names of his references. [Fixed—Terez]
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I tried to avoid talking about this much before because I don't want you to focus on what's Brandon and what's RJ, but now that it's all out, I do have a little more freedom. One thing is that early when I went to Charleston, I felt RJ was always adding characters, so I didn't want to add too many. I wanted to show something happening at the Black Tower, so Androl became my character that I took and expanded on from minor to main character. Androl himself and his relationship with Pevara was me. I felt the series needed it, and I’ve always wanted an Asha'man to play with, so to speak.
More generally, for The Gathering Storm I have said RJ worked a lot on Egwene's viewpoints. Not as much on Rand. Rand was more me, Egwene was more RJ. In Towers of Midnight, RJ worked a lot on Mat and not much on Perrin. So if it's Mat, it's more likely to be RJ. If it's Perrin, it's more likely to be me. In A Memory of Light he worked mostly on beginning and end, not much on the middle. Merrilor and the last few chapters are a lot of RJ. In between, it's a lot more me.
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Let me start by saying that if they hadn't been happy, it wouldn't be in the book. But anything where you work with an editorial team, you'd show them a scene, and they may say that's great, or they may say that it doesn't feel right or wouldn't be a good fit for the story. And sometimes you'll say "I'll change it" or "let me finish this draft, and we'll see what it looks like at the end". As far as the gateways, I felt it wouldn't be realistic otherwise. I've wanted to do with gateways since I was a kid, doing things like I showed in the book. If I had them, what would I do with them? I asked this when I was a kid, so there was a lot that I wanted to do with gateways that were in my own notes that I wanted to do that I couldn't do in my own books, so I stayed away from things that the Wheel of Time had done. So when I got to write WoT I broke out those files. The gloves were off; it was time to do things that I wanted to do but didn't want to rip off the Wheel of Time. At the end of the day, I convinced them to do it. They kept saying "they're all over the place!" so I said "if you could use them, you'd use them a lot". I didn't intend it to be a shout out of any kind, it's things I've wanted to do with gateways for like 15 years. It wasn't a shout out to the fandom. It's been an interesting experience. A lot of people think that I just wrote what the fans thought, but it's things that I felt the characters and the world would do, and if the fans happened to have talked about it, it's because it's what I thought would happen. In fact, as I wrote the books, I read very little of the fandom in order to prevent those exact thoughts from taking root.
During and after the signing, we had the discussion with Brandon about Dannil Lewin. Originally, Dannil had actually gone with Rand, Perrin, and Mat from the Two Rivers on their journey, and played a major role in events of book 3 or 4. In the end, Harriet convinced RJ that it may be better without Dannil, so some of Dannil's comments in A Memory of Light are a shout out to that of sorts. Just a fun story I thought you all might find interesting.
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The signing line wrapped around the perimeter of the bookstore which gave fans the chance to peruse Weller Book Works amazing and unique collection of books. Seriously, if you're ever in Salt Lake, go to this store. Brandon, in his remarks, reminded everyone to support bookstores like these; there would be no good place to have book signings without bookstores, and it's a bit difficult to sign books at the web stores. Memory Keeper Brigitte went through the line playing WoT hangman with fans who were waiting. Brandon took his time with each fan answering their unique (or spoilery) questions. One guy, who is a shoe-in for Perrin's body double, asked Brandon to sign his bicep. That happened.
As a special treat for all of us, the fantastic folks from Badali Jewelry were also at the signing, and they brought great serpent rings, WoT character signet rings, a couple foxhead medallions and much more. They sold more than just WoT items; they also sold items inspired by some of Tor's other series. We saw jewelry from Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller series and Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series. They also generously donated an Asha'man dragon pin, which we auctioned off benefiting the Waygate Foundation, and gave us two items to giveaway—Moiraine's headpeice and a Mistborn metal alphabet.
Thanks to Tor Books and Badali Jewelry, the giveaways were really stellar. We paired Memory of Light messenger bags with a WoT trivia booklet and a paperback of Way of Kings or Memory of Light iPhone case. We had so much to share with fans that if we had done it all separately, we wouldn't have gotten through it all! Everyone had raffle tickets, and many people stuck around for the giveaways after their books were signed—which created a nice cluster of excited fans getting to know each other while they waited. We were raffling off every 5 minutes or so, and kept going until 10pm. The bookstore let us take that large book cover poster from the lectern, and we gave that away too with Brandon's signature on it. The fans were thrilled at that one.
The evening drew to a close and we Memory Keepers stuck around to visit and help Brandon as he signed and personalized pre-ordered books for the store. We had all wished for a little more time with him (who wouldn't?), so used the time to pester him with more questions in-between books. We had a discussion about the swords of WoT and learned that most blademaster swords in the books were katanas, much to our surprise, as many of us had imagined them being larger weapons.
We all had an amazing time being part of this experience, this moment in WoT history, and it's not an event we'll soon forget. Our sincere thanks to Dragonmount.com for giving us this opportunity!
Signed,
The SLC Memory Keepers