Sanderson takes Wheel of Time break

No need to panic, but prolific American fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is taking a small break from his duties finishing Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series.

As Wikipedia notes, Sanderson, who currently has several of his own fantasy series on his plate, was selected by Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal after the author tragically passed away in September 2007 to finish Jordan’s masterpiece. The first book, The Gathering Storm, has already been finished and is presumably in editing or production now.

As Sanderson noted in a recent post on his blog Mistborn:

“I’ve been working on The Wheel of Time straight since January 2008. Eighteen months is the longest I’ve ever spent on the same project, and I’m feeling that I need to step back from it for a short time and let my mind recharge.”

For Sanderson, this means he won’t be writing any new Wheel of Time material for the next month or so, although he will be working on outlines and plans for the next pieces of WoT writing he’ll be doing.

The author’s scheduling is not unexpected; in fact he flagged it back in early May. At the time, Sanderson wrote that he had turned in The Gathering Storm. The working title for the next book is Shifting Winds. “My self-imposed goal for finishing Winds is November 3rd,” he wrote.

Sanderson also noted that he’s been lobbying McDougal to title the final Wheel of Time book A Memory of Light. The initial plan was to title the final three books with the Memory of Light moniker and then use sub-titles, but now things have changed.

So what else is Sanderson working on? Quite a lot … the fourth book in the Alcatraz series (which he’s working on right now), a “nifty gearpunk young adult book” he has dubbed Scribbler, another young adult book named Dark One, an epic fantasy which Sanderson isn’t currently happy with named The Liar of Partinel/Dragonsteel, and sequels to some of his stand-alone books and the Mistborn series.

But his real passion appears to be in the first of another epic series entitled The Stormlight Archive. That book is entitled The Way of Kings.

Commentary
You gotta feel sorry for Brandon Sanderson.

No matter what he does, no matter how great his Wheel of Time books are when they are eventually published, he is going to get panned by hardcore WoT fans. I’m one of them. I’ve spent untold hours reading and re-reading the Wheel of Time FAQ (if you’re a Wheel of Time fan, go there, now), and I’ve read Jordan’s whole epic several times over.

The Jordanites will claim, inevitably, that Sanderson’s conclusion to Jordan’s lifework won’t be up to scratch compared to the original vision. And perhaps there will be a grain of truth in that: I don’t think anybody could truly do Jordan justice. I haven’t read any of Sanderson’s stuff yet, although I plan to. However, he himself has admitted that working on the Wheel of Time has forced him to grow immensely as a writer.

However.

That’s not the point. We should applaud Sanderson for having the courage to even attempt such an immense task. And his writing on his blog reveals he is immensely sensitive to the needs and dreams of WoT fans.

I admire him. He’s not giving up his principles as a writer. He’s honouring those who have come before him (namely, Jordan), but he’s not leaving his own work and his own visions completely by the wayside. For these attributes, if he does a competent job of the WoT conclusion we’re all waiting for, almost anything can be forgiven.

I do have one cautionary message for Brandon Sanderson, if he ever chooses to read this post on Keeping the Door. You, sir, do need to be mindful of some of the gross mistakes and incompetencies that have come before you. When working with someone else’s vision you need to be immensely careful.

I speak, of course, of travesties like the Dune sequels being published by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert, all of which should be destroyed wholesale because they are uniformly awful and represent a terrible trampling on Frank Herbert’s memory.