It's Harriet's job to point out to her writer things like that. It just gets tiresome after a while to include everyone instead of using the name that's put on the cover of the book. It matters little to me who is responsible for what - only the book as it stands matters when commenting it.

OTOH, it's part of story telling and writing skills to have a flair for what sort of information your readers will feel the need for and provide it to them. In a series as complex as WOT - with tons of POVs and shifts of locations etc., it's part of the writer's job to foresee the needs for timeline markers, brief allusions that help the more casual reader keep track of who this and that minor player is and so on. People often tend to think of Jordan as a "terrible writer", but that isn't black and white. It takes a lot of writing skills and experience to handle a story so big - just think of how few continuity mistakes (as opposed to a few retcons) Jordan himself made.




Not really. Not to professionals. Your misconception about this comes from the fact you think this is done as the author is writing. This is not how it's done. It is done during the editing phase, after Harriet (as in this case she's the one doing this job) assembled all the scenes in chapters and so on. The final chronology is then established (and it's kept on spreadsheets etc. - it's a matter of a few minutes to establish which scene in Rand's storyline happens in parallel with one in Perrin's and so on). This is when Brandon and her would finally get to see the big picture and some polishing up of the novel begins. Harriet and Jordan used to do that last phase together, and spent months on it.

That's the real problem with the two new novels so far. It's not a matter of skills or Brandon being a bad writer etc. It's that TOM in particular seriously lacks polish. It feels unfinished, too much still like a draft. That's the fault of the deadline Harriet and co. put on themselves. Even the decision to split the books by storylines was a rushed, last minute one. Everyone realized at some point Brandon would never be able to finish in time, and Harriet/Tom were about to give up publishing a book as promised. Brandon went back and came up with a way to re arrange things tio make a book out of what he had written, and after some thought Harriet gave this the green light. Of course most of what is now in TOM wasn't written and Brandon had no clear idea in his mind yet of what sort of novel he could get out of it. He knew he could make a solid book out of what he had written for Rand and Egwene, and indeed that far it worked quite well, though it missed the additions of secondary characters and POV to really fell like WOT.

What Brandon couldn't know is that in the end, the remainder wouldn't work so well as one book, and would require many dubious compromises to even work at all.

He also saw really well how what he had written stood together thematically, once he's finished. What he has missed is that the rest he had not yet written was also going to fit to form a whole, because Jordan had planned all this aspect really well. What's sad is that Jordan made many compromises (at the reader's expense) over the last few books to get his damned storylines synchronized exactly as he wanted them to be for his finale. Re arranging so drastically the order and way Jordan intended to tell the finale definitely created many problems.

Also sad is the fact Jordan foresaw all this - and said long ago he just couldn't split the finale. And yes, I wished they'd had stuck to that, and did the right thing, which was to finish AMOL before making a decision on how the book ought to be split for publication.

The truth is, had they done that, not only the books would have been much better, but they would have finished the whole thing probably at least a year earlier. Instead of the completely weird structure TGS forced them to follow in TOM, they would have divided the book in no doubt a much cleverer way.



So were mine. I was impressed with TGS. But my opinion changed after TOM, which for me was a massive disappointement. And I think what's sad is that I don't think Brandon is the bad choice for the books, or that he is bad. Instead, I was saddened by the fact he clearly had the potential to end up doing this in a pretty spectacular way, with someone with as intimate a knowledge of the series and editing experience as Harriet has. But they just didn't give themselves all the time they required to get the best possible books out of their common efforts. Both books were terribly rushed. Not the writing of them, but mostly phase 2. They had to edit and polish those books ridiculously fast. Brandon was near exhaustion after TOM. Alas, good books are rarely written that way.


I just can't satisfy myself with finding out how this and that storyline ends etc. (and I think a lot of people have been blinded to how bad a novel TOM is by their pleasure at reading resolution at last. They've enjoyed individual scenes a lot and how things turns out (which is to credit to RJ, incidentally), and for now at least it seemed very satisfying to them (it reminds me of how people raved about some scenes of the SW prequels and after it was all over the disappointement with the whole trilogy kept rising and rising, even among those who were quite positive earlier on). I'll be curious to see if they'll like TOM/TGS so much a few years from now, when the discovery aspect has long eroded and the flaws and annoying bits become more and more apparent. It will also be more apparent how weaker they are than all Jordan's own entries when they're read right after a full re read.