A Memory of Light (14th volume in Robert JordanΓÇÖs ΓÇ£The Wheel of TimeΓÇ¥ Series)

each year microsoft research helps hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available my name is Brian Hill and it's my pleasure to welcome our guests and welcome all of you I I'm a developer in the office division so this is not my normal thing of organizing these events I got an email from somebody at tour last week saying can you host this author and march and I had to say I'm sorry no but for Brandon I'm happy to to go to the extra trouble I would like to thank a few people I'd like to thank Amy Draves and the Microsoft Research visiting speakers series for providing this venue they are filming this for broadcast into the overflow room if if you have trouble finding seat and also people are tuning in around the company if you would like to learn more about the visiting speaker series and come to see other authors and dignitaries please join one of the speaker aliases speaker to speaker three four five and six and they wrote that up on on the board and then you'll get notifications of other event I'd also like to thank tor tor has sent us some goodies that we'll be raffling off at the end we've got some backpacks and some paperbacks of the wave kings yeah so those of you watching run on down here you might be able to in something yeah you heard him we also have some more bookmarks we have got rithmatist bookmarks especially for anybody with young readers Brandon will talk a little bit more about his upcoming books when I let him speak also I would like to thank Blaine and the university bookstore they have been longtime supporters of Brandon Sanderson and they make it possible each year for Brandon to come to Seattle which makes it possible for him to come and join us I've known Brandon for five or six years and I met him during one of the Mistborn book tours and this is the second time that he's come to Microsoft I'm grateful for him for doing that we he brought with him a special guest which many of you recognize the wife of robert jordan Harriet McDougal's will be speaking a little bit as well she is has a long career in in editing she was the editor for all of the wheel of time books as well as other books that you may have read so since you really have come to hear them I will turn the time over to Brandon and Harriet thank you so way back in nineteen ninety i wandered into my local bookstore it's called cosmic comics it's a little tiny shop I actually usually rode my bike there even though I was I was approaching 16 I couldn't legally drive uh-huh so I'll just say I rode my bike there ah and every week I would go in and I would see what new books were on the shelf to the right of me as right as I'd walk in they had this little shelf they sold science fiction fantasy books and comic books I wasn't as interested in the comic books I was there for the fantasy novels and they had this thing where you buy ten and you get one free which had me sold right free book rights did so I would always I would always plan and I would buy a 10 cheap ones and then find the really expensive thick one which was like a dollar more and get that one free i thought i'm the son of an accountant so i thought i was getting away with something and there on the shelf was a big book big buck now I always say length of the book doesn't actually in indicate its quality but I had learned very on early on as a fantasy reader that you wanted the big books because you liked the book you had that much more to love if you got a short book and you fell in love with it it was over before you knew it and if you got a big book you would say well you know you by the time you fell in love with you had this big book to read and there was a big book on I am NOT your your typical writer I guess there are no typical writers but a lot of writers I know you asked him when they first started started right in there like oh yeah I was six months old started my first story was a war epic and you talked two riders maybe you know all this stuff I was what we call a reluctant reader so that's a literacy person term I didn't know it back then all i know is i didn't like books all through the latter part of my grade school days and my first two years of middle school 7th 8th grade i did not like books in fact i was convinced the books were boring and people kept trying to get me to read books and they would give me these books and every one of these books would have liked um this like boy who goes off and lives in the forest and it has this like pet dog and then his dog dies and everyone sad um and I read like three of these and I'm like books are dumb why is that I don't need I don't like dogs I'm a cat person so I'm actually happy when the dogs died but I'm just joking dogs are wonderful my cats and my mom wife's a dog person so um but no they just thought books were not for me um last part of my eighth grade year I had a teacher her name was ms reader by coincidence she's my English teacher and she insisted that i read a book on her shelf this is because i had gotten really good at faking my way through book reports and i was a clever little boy that realized you could find out what was in a book without reading it and then write a very convincing book report and my teacher made me pick a book that she had read recently there's a little stack them you know like in these schools they have these racks of ratty paperbacks like a hundred students of redness like yesterday spaghetti is stained on one but you know every teacher has these things and I had to pick one of these books and so she wouldn't let me get away with this time I dragging my feet went to the back of the the classroom and browsed through these ratty books and came across this book with the dragon on the cover now I had not tried a fantasy book since Lord of the Rings which if you give Lord of the Rings to a boy whose not really that good at reading despite it being a brilliant novel all it does is convince you that Lord of the Rings is a lot like Isaiah right that you're like oh I'm sure this is wonderful but i'll let someone else tell me why and i had not finished Lord of the Rings and so but I saw this and there was this this dragon and it also had a very attractive young woman on the cover which I will admit helped quite a bit also I'm so michael whalen painting he's a fantastic illustrator it was a dragon spain by barbara hambley if any of you have read this I highly recommend some wonderful book I picked this up even it was a bit thicker than I perhaps it wanted I would you know did the normal middle schooler thing looking for the shortest ones first and i took this book home and read it and it changed my life this sounds stupid when i say it i realize it's a it's a dopey little fancying alright but it changed my life if there was something in there in the imagination the realism of the characters mixed of this wonderful scenario dragon span is about a middle-aged woman who tries to convince her husband not to go slay a dragon he did it when he was young and now there's another dragon but now they're they're middle-aged and you know they're probably like in their early 40s but to me they were like ancient when i was reading this and it like why should a 14 year old boy connect right with this book about a middle-aged woman having a midlife crisis which is what the books about but i loved it it was amazing and i ran back to my teacher i said people write books about dragons this is wonderful she's like yeah there's lots of them wishlist thing told the card catalog you should go investigate this um and so I did now these are for the younger people neons card catalogs for these things that they were talking about of stone actually and you had to love them open and inside em and cavemen script it would write be our thurs alphabetically in the titles alphabetically yes we had two of them my school so I went to the title card catalog said well dragon Spain was good what's the next card after it was a book called dragon flight by anne mccaffrey I'm like well this one has a dragon on the cover and that looks like an attractive young woman also so i will read that book lo and behold dragons dragon flight is one of the best fantasy books ever written hugo award-winning novel by one of the bet the greatest names in the genre also with this wonderful michael whalen cover and so I read through everything they had of that um and the next one in line actually was dragon prints by Melanie Ron also with an attractive young woman to cover her by coincidence i'm sure um and I became a fantasy addict read every fantasy book I could get my hands on um and it's kind of funny story that somewhere someone gave me a david eddings novel which some of you may have read i actually was skeptical because i'm like i don't know if a guy can write fantasy as i was reading Barbara hamley and anne mccaffrey at that point and but i gave david eddings a chance and and david eddings further got fantasies hooks in me and so by that fall I was super fancy attic man i was reading everything I could get my hands on um and and was absolutely loving it um and it i think it was actually i've been telling the story wrong because i think it was actually the following spring um that wheel of time came out because i think i would have been 14 there turned 15 but when it whatever it was I got I of the world I remember when it came out in paperback and I picked this book up and it was a big book and I have been searching for something my friends had given me david eddings one of my friends was a huge ray feist fan and everyone had their series that they followed that they were in love with and everything I read Thomas covenant and Dragon Riders and all these things were seriously were already established the people suggested to me um and I had not yet found my series to suggest to people and I was kind of searching for it right you know how that is like fantasy become my thing I'm like I want to be a fantasy hipster but I'm not because everybody's giving the boats hipsters didn't exist back then but that's that was the mindset I found this book and I'm like I may give this one a try and it was amazing i love this book I of the world and I remember distinctly getting done with it and thinking haha I've found it i am going to be on the ground floor for this one um and then when this trilogy is done i'm going to be the one giving it to people and talking about how you should read this and i remember when the great hunt came out and my little bookstore did not get the hard covers for trade paperbacks very often but the great hunt came out in trade paperback and i said aha other people are figuring it out now the book is being released in trade paperback it must be getting popular and then the Dragon Reborn came out in hardcover and I thought I knew it this is the series it's taking off and I was there first how many of you guys read the books in 1990 start you have anyone here that's a surprising number man it's been a long road hasn't it hahaha no big wheel of time fan is is a really interesting experience so I don't know if any of you guys felt this but it seems like everyone I talked to has like at least one period of extreme rage towards Robert Roy never it's weird isn't it we love this series we love him and yet I this is honest truth my friend Mike and I my roommate he actually took my jacket photos you can go look his captain to mow from the oddness foreign books I named after him Micah demo for years in the late 90s early 2000s any time someone said Robert Jordans name we I don't know if I told you this we both raised our fish to the air and said damn him hahaha unison he still does it I can't do it anymore but yeah we did it in unison it was like a thing for us because you know it's like this series is never ending we love it y at the same time you know it's been ups and downs over the years and the wheels time has followed me through my career it's a really interesting thing when I got to college I decided I wanted to be a writer and I started reading the books that I loved as a youth and studying them and trying to figure out how to do writing because I love my professors but writing teachers don't actually teach you how to write nothing you guys are taking writing classes but but they're like well let's explore your inner voice and I'm like you're telling me after your voices well I already do but they're not telling me how to write how do i write how do i make a character cool and teachers start really big on teaching you how to make characters cool they like to teach you how to develop your style and so I started reading books um and I was actually very very disappointed because some of the authors that i read i will mention names but some of the office i read as youth did not hold up as when I was an adult and they were perfect for me at the age but as I tried to inspect them as an adult rider trying to develop my style I didn't find the depth that I wanted to dig into that I thought would make um that would teach me how to write robert jordan still did in fact Robert Jordan was the one that I would dig into and find how much I'd missed I constantly tell a story about as a fifteen-year-old reading these books bit you know there's this character Maureen who's just like you know always keeping the boys down and not letting him deeded she's always giving mortars and I was always like more'n just leave him alone they need to go off and do cool things um and then I read the books as an adult um well I'm studying that I'm like you stupid kids listen to Maureen right there's this depth of the wheel of time books that the the various characters are all expressed on very different levels and Maureen has an entire story going on behind the scenes that you don't see because you'll see her through her viewpoints and there's a little subtlety in detail I mean yeah maybe I'm dense but I didn't get the whole thing with it being our world and there and and who was not buzz aldrin um land on Glen being in the book referenced an American Russia in the Cold War being referenced in legend I didn't get that stuff till I was in college and I'm like how did I miss that you know it's like a smack to the face right the first time you read realize that Egwene is Guinevere which is Guinevere and you know you don't I didn't get this as a kid and building these things out and understanding them and seeing the depth of writing that he was capable of that the really wonderful sentences that evokes so much feeling emotion and description I started studying the wheel of time to learn how to write it became my primary model just on a prose level of how to do this thing that no one could teach me how to do I spent the next I decided I wanted to be a writer actually I was a serving a mission for the LDS Church in Korea the reason is I really wanted to be a writer before then but my mother convinced me the writers don't get scholarships and that I should be a doctor instead and so I actually applied to BYU I grew up in Nebraska to go go be a chemistry major because that got scholarships and then I got into college and realized what they do to all those people who just said they want to be chemistry majors to get a scholarship as they put them in a really hard chemistry class that other people don't have to take their freshman year to show you what chemistry is like aa and let I then went went to Korea and was so happy to be on a different continent from chemistry I did not enjoy that that freshman year but I did spend a lot of that time writing and i decided i missed writing so much but i didn't miss chemist that I had make him made the wrong choice and I decided to start writing a book on my days off during during my missionary work and I just started writing in a notebook and I completely fell in love with the process I'd known since a kid this is what I want to do but that's the first time that that it clicked for me that what I love to do should be my job right that I could spend eight hours working on a story and come out of it feeling awesome and have not not missed that time at all I get the same thing from a lot of my friends who were code monkeys it kind of scratches the same then you get into it and you're creating something that's working and it's clicking and yes it can be hard but you love it at the same time that's what I wanted to do over the course of the next eight years i wrote 13 novels trying to break in and i eventually sold alondras my sixth book and i sold it to tor books um and when I got an offer from tour it was funny I called up my age and he said well I want to take this and I want to shop it because usually you can get a better offer if you have one offer from somebody this is basic business philosophy right and you go to everyone else say well we got this offer from this company will you beat it and I said no you can't do that he's like but we can get more money and I said tour is Robert Jordans publisher we're not going anywhere else when you have an offer from the top you just take it and I did and heed to this not to this day because things have kind of changed my career but there were many years where he would say to me you know I still wish you'd let me take in that I bet we could have you know got it got a bigger launched in yadda yadda yadda and when I did start working on the wheel time I actually called him I said so do you still wish he's like I you know but in 2007 robert jordan passed away um and I had never met him I had been able to see him once at a convention but I had never met two met him all this time I viewed him as a mentor um but I I didn't know him we had sent him my fur look he got all sorts of Arc's though Harriet later found it everyone says they're booked to Robert Jordan right and you know when you get you when your first book I just sent him a book because you know of course you're going to send your idol a book but I never expected him to read it and it was perfectly all right but we did send him a book we did dig it out later and I was terrified for what would happen to the series as everyone was but I trusted tour I trusted um Robert Jordan and I assumed that the series was in good hands even though i had read many interviews where he said if he passed away the series would not be finished and that he would have his his notes bulldozed um and um in 2007 about a month or so maybe maybe less than that after he passed away I got a phone call and I'm actually going to let Harriet tell her story now of where that all came from the week of after my husband's funeral a friend was staying with me she'd come down for the service and she as so many people always both a fan of fantasy and heavily into the net and she put a print out 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 once been a court reporter and I was scrabbling around in the kitchen making food or something and Jim who's read the book who's not read the book the last one who has to finish the last well okay it was no spoilers 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 fortunate because I was trying to take notes and instead I was just staring at him and 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 and the rest of the series that's how I knew he wanted it finished otherwise he kept his mouth shut which was not very much in his nature Oh so anyway I read this wonderful eulogy and thought yeah and a call I've worked with Tom Doherty the publisher of tour for 40 years in fact I was the original editorial director of tour and I called him and said yo tom tell me about Sanderson and he's a publisher so he said well as numbers on the language I'm an editor I don't want numbers he said I'll send you miss born elantris is his first novel and as I'm sure you know in the industry we think of first novels as that's the bike with training wheels and if you really want to see what a writer can do look at the second so I began reading it I got to page 47 and I fell asleep which was not his fault I've gotta tell you if the story that I'm reading is in trouble I cannot go to sleep until I've either figured out how to fix it or throw it across the room and says so much for that one it's a peculiarities of the editorial personality so I woke up and his world was clear his characters were clear even what they ate the conflicts and I said yeah this guy can do it he really can I can feel it and see it so I called Tom and told him what I thought he said Harriet because he knows me 40 years worth he said have you read the whole book and I said no and and he said don't you think you should this is a very important decision and I said there would be a very important decision if I were hiring Brandon to write a Sanderson novel but i'm not i'm hiring him to write a robert jordan novel and he can do it and unspoken was cuz I'll make him so anyway that was that was the beginning and I really was quite sure but I i do have remnants of common sanson and I called the British publisher and said do you have any suggestions and I called an editor in New York whose opinion I trust and said do you have any suggestions and anybody better right there yeah and that went on for a number of weeks and while I stood on this decision a bit and and then I called Brandon Sanderson and I didn't do the professional thing and say hey tor give me his number I thought Provo Utah that's got to be that big I called information and I got a woman who answered the phone I said is this brandon sanderson so since she said yes it is and i said well i'm here the my name is Harriet mcdougal and I'm the widow of robert jordan and i'd like to talk to him about finishing the series that my husband road and she said i have no idea what you're talking about that was the other Brandon Sanderson he's a wrestler all I know about him we got google mix mixed us up I Bing mixed us up so anyway then I called New York got the right number and called Brandon and and so I got I got up in the morning now I am I keep an artist schedule that's a nice way of saying that I sleep in till noon I working from about I do a lot of my writing from about 10 until 4am and then I sleep until about noon and I get up and then i work from about noon until five doing mostly during that time email and things like that um but anyway so I get up and every day when i get up the first thing i did i checked my voicemail i used to UM now now I let people call my assistant uh voicemail annoys me um I'll answer it if it's Harriet ah but I listen to my voicemail um and there was a voicemail sad hello Brandon this is Harriet mcdougal um I would like you to call me back there's something I want to talk to you about she said well Robert Jordans widow but I already already knew who Harriet big google was but and so I just got this voice mom like what what ah now you gotta remember it's not like I applied for this or anything um I did not and it's not like I had any clue I honestly assumed that it was taken care of I'm and was just a fan wanting to read what came out just like everyone else and so I called Harriet back and she didn't answer I'm she was out having massage yeah so I called my editor and he didn't answer but he never answers so it's ok but I called my agent who always answers needed an answer um and so I wandered upstairs to my wife and I this is one of these those distinct memories they get kind of burned in your brain and I walked into the bedroom and she was folding clothes or something and I said Robert Jordans Widow just called me and my wife is like what cuz when we got married she made wheatley exchanged books she had to read the real time and I had to read robin mckinley Robin kinless looks like that but but she was well versed in wheel time she'd actually read out of the world before we got married so that would that was a point in her favor early lead any process she hadn't read the whole series which she has done now um and um she said so what what did what did Robert Jordans would have want so I don't know I can't get all over her and so um my wife she uh she says she's never seen me that nervous um and she really hasn't I'm not the nervous type I'm one of these I'm very comfortable with lots of different situations I'm just kind of a go-with-the-flow sort of guy if you get my wife up here she says that that on that day I was more nervous than she then on my wedding day she says that jealously but I had monster you ready for the wedding this was out of out of nowhere right it just came out of nowhere um and I finally got smart and i called up tour um and I got ahold of Patrick Nielsen Hayden who is one the editors there and I said Patrick Robert Jordans Widow just called me and patrick said I remember this distinctly too oh yeah that's probably what you think it is I'll have her call you back I'm like what do I think it is Patrick even say word would not say word he knew Harriet very very well and knew you that he did not want to be breaking any news and so Harry called me back and she said well I was just wondering if you would be interesting we're compiling a short list yes a short list Hey yes that's not what I said yes we're compiling a short short list of people we're considering and where I'm wondering if you would be interested in finishing the wheel of time um and I said I always say this every one last but you really it's true I don't of Herot remembers it but I could I could not speak I had to write her an email the next day and which I said I promise I can form coherent sentences I was completely unable to to reply to her I did get out of yes mom but that was about it I was just stuttering in things um and then that night it hit me that night I couldn't sleep as one might imagine and I came to the realization a couple of realizations the first one being holy cow if I screw this up it's going to be the worst disaster of my life both personally because I love these books and because i know there's like 10 million fans who will all find out where I live I know right things that begin sander said yeah um and I thought if I see if I screw this up and it kind of went further than that with me thinking how can I not screw this up because the only person who could write this the right way is robert jordan and anyone who tries to write the book is going to screw it up to an extent because it won't be one hundred percent his vision with the way it was supposed to be and i still believe that I think we got really close I think we made fantastic books um I think we did a wonderful job I'm very proud of my work but at the same time I acknowledge it's not quite what he would have done there's no way for me to do what he would have done um and so I debated calling and saying no because I thought nobody can do this it is impossible to do this work and something stopped me kind of the the third realization of the night which was what would happen if I said no and they went and they hired somebody who didn't love the series what would happen and there are a lot of writers out there who were better than I am I will be upfront with that I know many a writer who are much better writers and I but none of them had read the wheel of time Maya Angelou hasn't read the wheel of time you know and what would happen if if one of them took over the wheel of time and then wrote it beautifully but didn't get the characters right and didn't do the book the right way it would be my fault um because I said no and I could have I could have done it and I came to realization that if Robert Jordan couldn't write the books as a writer myself yes I wanted to do it because I really felt that I would screw it up the least I felt that it maybe some of you felt something like this like I'm gonna do it myself um and I had these moments of yes I will do this and I will do this myself and I will make sure that everyone who's out there like me terrified of what's going to happen that they get the book and it's the right book that it's that it's still the wheel of time um and so that's when I wrote that email to Harriet the next day and I said yes I want to do this and I was very straightforward that time no no hemming in hind this time I really want to do this I think I can do it not as well as Robert Jordan but better than anyone else out there because if you take wheel a time fandom and there are bigger wheel of time fans than me maybe take all of wheel time fandom and you take pretty good fantasy writers and you make a Venn diagram I'm right there in the middle and so I said yes um and then Harriet said well I need a little more time to consider which is justified and I went on book tour completely nervous for an entire month not able to tell people that I was a bit i've been offered the chance to work on the wheel of time maybe after this nerve-racking book tour um would in which I yeah one of those stores I was very early in my career though that was one of those tours where I would go to bookstores and sometimes nobody would be there um and they would have not have ordered in the books because they're like who are you again um and things like this um I got back and hear it called me and said yes I would like you to do this I'm in a few weeks we had all contract negotiations done a contract in the ocean agents wit like this my IV agent who I do love by the way even though I may his job is to offer me the the business side right cuz I'm an artist my bit my agent said okay well we'll hey we'll do some negotiations and this is our bargaining ground and this and I'm like no no no no we just say yes he's like well we could try to push for this and I'm like fun though we say yes and so he had to call back right after the offer and say we say yes big shortest negotiation of my entire life I had contracts in hand like lightning speed when we got the offer on my first book offer came in April we had contracts in November offer on this came on monday and i think we had contracts on thursday or something like that and within a week i was flying to Charleston and I um I tell this story a lot but it's a fun story I flew in Harriet herself pick me up at the airport I've been really nervous to meet Harriet like you know really nervous I knew Harry like she was one of the big editors in the field and authors have this kind of even you know published authors are sometimes kind of scared of editors right um and Harriet I didn't know if you guys know I mean she edited ender's game ok she edited and discovered Robert Jordan and she's she's behind the two biggest book in fantasy and science fiction of the last 30 years ender's game and I of the world so I was really nervous and so I'm like and then I meet her and as you can tell she's like this wonderful um just so nice awesome person it was Hailey's such a relief i'm like oh good I actually called Emily let that night I'm like III didn't need to be worried like cake your favorite grandmother and mix her with a Southern gentleman and you have Harriet I've hidden the quips uh and um I am she drove me to the house I'm there in Charleston um which is this wonderful house built in the 1700s right nough barely 1798 and we walk in the door and harried have been cooking dinner it was a bean soup I still remember all these things where she said well I put some soup on and I can warm it up and would you like to have some food and I said I would like the ending please because I didn't know um you know I just signed the contracts without knowing you know you guys work for Microsoft NDA stuff you got to say yes first and then you get ban da and then you get to be part of it and so I knew that there was an ending that because Robert Jordan talked about writing the ending I knew that an area to confirm the ending had been written and um so I walked in and it's it was like ten o'clock at night but I got that ending and I sat down in the front room sitting room and I read what you now have as primarily the epilogue of a memory of light almost all the epilogue was in there also contained there were several big important scenes from the prologue which we split among the three prologues there are a couple of the really cool scenes in there there was the Tower of Genji there was a place where Egwene gets a special visitor and the I think it's called a cup of tea that scene but really it was the ending that I wanted to read and there's the blank in the blank there's the blanket like yes which is up which is in the prologue of a memory of light one of the prologue sequences and I read all of this and read his ending which you now have in your hands and Harriet afterwards she said well what do you think and I said it was satisfying that was my word for it it was this it was the right ending I felt a huge sense of relief I'm in a lot of ways there wasn't a lot there there were 200 pages and so it wasn't it wasn't huge um but at the same time it was a huge relief to me because the ending had been done and it had been done right and my job then was not so impossible because all I had to do was get from well written book to well-written ending without screwing it up too much I mean having that ending in hand is really what is made this possible and made it me able to work on these books in a way that I really feel conform to Robert Jordans vision for them because I knew where he was going and I tend to work from an ending that's how I write my books as I always have the ending in mind first and so that is the story of how you came to get a memory of light and it has been an awesome and daunting and horrifying and extremely hard and wonderful experience all in one people like to ask how does it feel to be done it feels like I can only imagine finishing a marathon my wife is done one and I could I she's talked about how finishing one feels it's like that it's been a marathon of five years for me and for a lot of us a marathon of 23 years and setting down that weight has been a relief but again it's something I couldn't set down until I was sure it was right and I feel really good about what's happened I'm very proud of my place in this and very honored by my opportunity to work on it and that's what I want to share with you guys that's my presentation so to speak but we are going to do some questions we have about 20 minutes left for questions and so I am going to go where there were three hands went up really fast and I'm going to go do these questions go ahead yes many authors tend to write themselves into their just wanting a broader jordan had done that in a particular fee had written himself in as brands Terran grill God he written himself into the book Robert Jordan did write himself in but it's it's not I think you're thinking of rants on grill that yes it's actually something else it's trung grill that they find in the EBU dark hash which is a man a jolly man statue that is full of stories and that was Robert Jordans cameo that he wrote himself in okay will you come up and use the mic because then the people who are listening can I can can hear what you have to say they're sitting at their their cubicles furiously producing new Microsoft Word products for me to write books with so it's a short question did you ever finish the book no but I've read it was a tease that's why I thought it was because you didn't see you didn't say you did or did not oh you read 47 pages but you didn't finish it right no I'm still have not but how many pages of brandon sanderson have i read now it was very interesting working with um with Harriet during that first year she talked about this little but she considered getting somebody working on the book to be like a dying request of Robert Jordans and um she once she found me and gave me the stuff she basically disappeared for a year mhm and if any of you who 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 that Harriet came back came on board and you know she's an editor and she needs something to work on done before but so she sit left me with it for that year and grieved mm-hm and then that's then that next year is when we worked on gathering storm after I had worked on some pros and things so at the end of the eye of the world the all-caps voice we ever find out who it was or what they were looking for they all adversity and the buy of the world makes an appearance in a memory of light what about what wasn't there what's that what about what wasn't there what do you mean what wasn't there haha maybe it'll be in the encyclopedia I can still wrap up things Harry just working on encyclopedia of the we have time which is coming out um maybe in two years yeah so I've heard you answer or explain in other interviews and ms mcdougal you you know expressed your late husband's fear fear or not being comfortable with others writing in his universe but I'm so curious did he leave notes or other bits of information about the Outrigger novels that he has alluded to so many times he about the Outrigger novels he left it's either one sentence or two sentences and that's a major reason why they won't exist okay there there was not enough of course they're all the notes on this series and all I can't tell you what he said because for the people in the room who haven't finished oddly enough they there's a spoiler in there sir um it just couldn't be it wouldn't be in any way sure his outriggers and I'm sorry well I understand that but I appreciate that thank you you're welcome uh hi thanks very much for coming and doing this appreciated um I've been looking at some of your you've done the webcasts where you record yourself writing and something I've noticed maybe it's just because of the thought process going on your head but you seem to type fairly slowly for somebody who's written you know multiple thousand-page novels and is that is that intentional that it sort of goes along with as you're thinking or or is it something that you wish that you could speed up if you have actually formally trained on how to type quicker I can type very quickly I can get up to EDD I think 87 or something like that I work by the process the creative process is slower than the fingers I'm not actually a very fast rider I'm not a slow writer I'm about middle of the pack um people talk about how quickly i right I don't write quickly I write a lot I do this compulsively I love to tell stories and one quirk of mine is that in order to take a break from telling stories I just tell a story I'm not supposed to be telling which is where a lot of the interesting books i'll talk about a few of them in a few minutes because Duane has them for sale that's where a lot of those things come from and so yeah I do not wish I could speed up I in fact there I don't even I don't want to be able to read faster actually started taking his Pete speed reading class in school and the first thing they said is you need to stop hearing the words as you read them in order to read faster and I said I don't want to stop hearing the words that's part of the beauty and I actually dropped that class like that because I realized that's not what I want speed rating is not what I want I don't want to go faster through the wheel of time that doesn't make any sense and it's the same thing with the grated process I don't mind if I have a second question since it's the guys behind you you gotta put yeah they look like they're nice fellows thank you um both I mean Jordan didn't plan 14 bucks certainly as you said you know this trilogy will be good and it's no secret that as an author he wasn't no author seems to be in complete control of their creation it evolves and he kept saying no more than three more books for like you know five five books from the end I think it appears like george RR martin seems to be in a similar place where you know this is how do you do you think that the experience of writing the end of wheel of time has given you a different perspective that will help you with storm lite archive or do you think that that will never have been do you think that your style would never you know did you always have it plotted out that it would never expand in that it certainly could expand it does happen to all authors but authors do tend to fall into two general categories george martin has great terms for these so I steal his he calls them gardeners and architects gardeners which robert jordan was was and and george martin is they explore their story and more discover it as they go robert jordan was actually a little bit like halfway between architect and gardener because he would always have waypoints he was writing toward um and like he knew the ending and things like that Stephen King is a complete gardener he says he doesn't know where he's going he just puts characters an interesting situation starts writing and george RR martin has said that he's a gardener i'm an architect and an architect is someone who plots out things beforehand and then writes them but even being an architect the creative process is such that if while you're working on it something better comes along you have to be willing to knock down the blueprints that you have done and and and build them up again that said I things have not expanded on me in the same way people point to the last book being split into three but I point to my very first blog post where I made about it where I said I was planning to write a single 800,000 word book and instead i wrote 11 it's about a million words so I'm within a fairly close hit I initially at two hundred thousand words twenty percent whatever but but yeah I'm more like a twenty percent then expenses that make sense a storm light is is um is written out at ten books and I honestly think that it will hit that 25 book arcs for those who are wondering I think it'll hit that but we'll see I have not never done something this long before on my own so two questions short question hast I was looking through the leaflet why is ramon de wanted in formatting ariat i have no clue alright and second question without being too terribly spoiler if 'ok what's the one thing you wanted to find out and didn't um ah there is an event in the epilogue that that one of the characters performs something that seems impossible by our understanding and robert jordan did not explain how or why that's fair ok I've got my own fan theories and those are they there yep thanks haha um I actually do have a spoiler question ok why don't you save that till afterward and come ask us ok um but I do want to say that your answer to his question there makes a whole lot more sense now that you didn't know i do not know either okay sorry when i say he wrote the epilogue he wrote the epilogue and he left notes on a lot of things but he didn't leave notes on the things he'd already finished because we didn't need to know how to write those so this is a question expanding on the whole garden a versatech thing you say that you're an architect yes I know it's not a wheel of time question actually but your non wheel of time works have this whole meadow world connecting them get our worlds and six hours and stuff where do you think you're going to go with that now that you oh I can tell you where I'm going to go with that I'm not sure how much I can say for those who don't know by epics are all connected there are continuing characters through a launch wrist into mist born into war breaker into wave Kings it's behind the scenes sort of thing it's not something you don't need to read them in order it's not something you need to know in order to read one of the books but there are continuing characters and I have a grand arc for what is going on it has to do with my original pitch to my editor on the Mistborn trilogy which was actually trilogy of trilogies way back in 2005 when I told him about it I wanted to do three trilogies one past one present one future and I want to do an epic fantasy trilogy which really explored kind of mythology and magic and then a modern-day trilogy in which the epic fantasy had become the foundations of myth and religion for a trilogy set in about a 1980s level technology and then I want to do a far future science fiction in which the magic which had gone through all of the other books became the means by which space exploration became possible and the foundation of technology particularly faster and light technology and so that is a core spine of the greater story that I'm telling I love you love time but please do that too that sounds amazing hi so you mentioned earlier that you have a tendency to write books you're not supposed to write yes kind of take a break uh-huh I assume a couple of those are like I'll live law and at Legion legion was one yep so I I really like those books but it seems kind of mean of you to leave so many unresolved plot threads anything any chance will get anything there yeah I'm Legion I actually wrote as a television show pitch was the idea for it pitches series and I immediately sold it to lions gate and so we'll see it's always hard to say what will happen in Hollywood because there's so much moving there and to get the pieces in place to make a show or a movie just take so much work um but but I'm hopeful that you will see more there i am doing more with alloy of law i'll explain that in a minute okay thank you yep so you already spoke to how daunting taking over the wheel time is and how what an extensive series it is one of the most impressive and interesting things to me and is that there's ones i believe 1700 named care as 2,500 2,500 gap that's even more than I thought it's crazy what is the fantasy author since you can't just look in the phone book or scrag to grab a name how do you find your inspiration for names um it really depends on the book I'm writing for some of my books i use interesting linguistic quirks that interest me I've taken taken a number of linguistics classes and so for instance for war breaker I use just something simple like repeated consonant sounds so we ended up with viv ena and sis abroad to give a theme to some of the names in way of kings symmetry is holy and so I use palindromes or one letter off palindromes as names and that's where a lot of the names came from in there for wheel of time Robert Jordan actually did look in the phone book the reason for the sping is he wanted to hearken to our world with the Wheel of Time implying the wheel of time is perhaps our world in the future or in the past and so he wanted names that felt like names of people you knew but changed a little bit and this is where things like Tom came from with with spell the nature mat with you know and all of this stuff and so he would go through the phone book looking for common names and tweaked them and so for a wheel of time naming I got lists of names I just had fans names and i just used these names and tweak them in order to try and get the same style and feel of naming one trick if you're having trouble with this that a lot of writers use is they will pick a geographic area in our world and they will base the names off of though that that geographic names like they'll say like I've used actually ancient Persian I'm like ancient Persian names sure and then I'll go and look at those and I will change them to to fit my characters but that way everyone from the same region has a a similar naming paradigm so there's all sorts of things that you can do thank you that's the most informative explanation of naming I've heard yeah hi Brandon I know that you're a pretty big cheerleader of e-books yes and you two have had some discussions over the years about ebooks could you just take a minute to talk about how specifically the ebooks for these three novels kind of yeah mom Harriet has been in publishing a very long time and understands publishing for a very long time and ebooks is kind of have kind of blindsided all of us I'm as she said earlier and it has talked about I swim in the net yes and Harry has gills uh-huh very much at home in AE world Harriet early on with the books was under the impression that ebooks were like the paperback via released the hardcover and then a year later you released the e-book and the paperback and she was under the impression that was how it would work and it's come as a surprise to many in the publishing industry that it doesn't work that way and let us talk about the elephant in the middle of the room which is the window opposed for a memory of light the e-book won't be out until the beginning of April a three-month window that is and that was my doing and I did it for the bookstores I love bookstores bookstores are a vanishing breed they're just going even I understand Barnes & Noble is talking about closing half their stores this to of a freak like me who just really has a thing for paper and bindings is very ominous and sad and I wanted to give the bookstore's a break book stores have been very good to robert jordan all his career and that's why there's a window i I've been trying very hard to find ways that we can um we can blend this because i really like books too in fact i'm a big fan of a lot of the independent booksellers you'll notice i went to him on tour Dwayne's bookstore you books is one of my favorites borderlands in san francisco and mysterious galaxy is out down in san diego on these bookstores these are places that supported me when I was brand new these folks book stores that have a focus on genre you know you would call some big book stores and they'd be like who are you we're not interested these bookstores are like hey a new author we want to meet you come and we will bring in our readers and we will let you you talk to them and things like this and it's a completely different experience and for a small genre like science fiction fantasy these stores mean a lot to us because you know the person at costco is not going to read our books and sell our books and but Dwayne does and you can go to Duane and you can say hey what if you read lately or what are people excited about and say hey I've read this it's good or this guy came and he was really nice and here's what his book is about and things like that and that is something in the small genres that I feel we are going to be clobbered by the vanishing of bookstores when people like John Grisham are not going to have to worry about it as much and so one of the things I've been trying to do is work out a you by the the hard copy either the paper back of the hardcover the print copy and you get the ebook for free that's one of the things that I'm trying to do and so my my my latest 20 my latest two smaller releases last year Legion and Emperor soul I actually will mail you the e-book of those two if you buy the hard copy and you send me an email we will respond with the drm free version in multiple formats that you can just read on any e-reader that you want and so that's just something I'm trying and I'm trying to use this as data points to convince tour to let me do this for my larger books for which they own the e-book rights the small books I was able to retain them on but that's not something viable for a big release like a storm lite archive book or something like that and so it's something I'm hoping we can convince them to let me start doing with my other books so we'll do these two last questions and then I'll talk a little bit more about books that we have for sale and then we will bid you farewell okay I'll be quick just first thanks both you all again there's been an amazing adventure the other question is so is there any chance where's the door open for the Wheel of Time story to be told in other forms of media so like movie or television sometime in the future the motion picture rights have been sold a universal and they are working on development of the eye of the world as a first movie I am told that they're working on a second draft of the script I haven't seen word one awesome thank you actually similar question though slightly broader scope so Robert well I should say the the Wheel of Time computer game came out mid 90s personally wasn't too fond of it but I'm hoping that other computer games and things like that based in that world will come out any plans for that is it sign yeah no game rights are with and forgive me I think they're doing business is mana Tharan they were red eagle it's the same people it's just a change of the moniker and they're working on it yeah you know though haven't heard any press about it is there anything any details available on the net I don't know not that we know oh no no major movement right now and last ones you're miss born computer game scheduled job compete miss porn game we pushed back until 2014 because we worried that we don't have specifics about the potential of new console relations in 2013 and we figured we would rather be a lot of you are like em I can't say anything we figured we would rather be a newer title on the new consoles than a title they got lost in the shuffle of all the hype about a potential 720 or things like that sound reasoning or thank you yep all right so by way of farewell to everyone there's just a few things I want to say first off if anyone's watching or anyone here my website is brandon sanderson calm and if you actually go in there and click on the war Brinker i need a new website by the way i'm sorry my websites antiquated but you click on the little gem that says war breaker you can download war breaker one of my novels for free and again drm free it's it's a free sample it's a complete epic fantasy it's I released it in 2009 I think so it's a standalone and I would recommend that to you and I thank you guys all for listening the other things I want to promote we'll have game Dwayne hold them up over there if you would we have copies of both Legion and the Emperor soul or we sold out okay well we have copies the impersonal on the Emperor Saul is one of these breather novels I did between books last year it is a novella it's about 200 pages it's set in the same world as the launch risk but it stands on its own it uses different characters if you've never tried anything of mine it's actually a really good place to start because it is show so short but it does all the things that I love to do really interesting magic system kind of approaches fantasy from my my path I think you'll really like it I think it's the strongest piece of short fiction I've ever done it's about a woman who was hired to create a forgery of the soul of the Emperor he's been wounded in the head left is a vegetable and they want her his his people want her to create a duplicate soul to stick in there so they can pretend he's still around okay and you have the Legion back at the store Legion is another one what else do you have back there Dwayne do you have do you we don't have any wheel of time back stock but we have alloy of law they're gone okay two and three of Miss porn Oh and at Bruce oh really if you haven't tried that one give that a try I will be hanging around for a little bit longer signing books Harriet will as well so thank you guys for welcoming us in

Channel: Microsoft Research

Views: 2,761

Keywords: microsoft research

Id: S9Z1B9AWD34

Length: 62min 29sec (3749 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2016