The sad thing is that this finally prevailed, for the third book. Had they made these calls earlier, at the beginning, we would still have gotten the final WOT book(s) in 2012, it's just that it would have been better books.

And it falls down to very human/personal issues, so I'm not inclined to be too harsh. I acknowledge the problems and bad calls, but there's no heat or anger toward Sanderson or the others for them.

Harriet felt she had to get to go forward as soon as possible, for the fans, for Jordan and for herself. That's understandable.


We're on the easy end of this, obviously. We're not the ones in mourning or with the pressure to make the decisions for a loved one's life work, or with the pressure not to disappoint the vocal part of the fanbase that was really eager to get the last book as fast as possible, and who wanted to know ASAP what would happen with the series (publishing wise, following Jordan's death).

Alas for the rest of the fanbase, those fans seemed to have determined Harriet's agenda.

With hindsight, the biggest mistake they made they made by going public too soon and in too many details, which occured because they put a massive amount of pressure on themselves to "keep the fans in the loop". I think they failed to see at the time that while no doubt many people would get genuinely impatient with them and be very vocal about it, a much larger part of the Jordan fanbase was rather very eager to get the books, but would have been perfectly understanding and supportive had they announced a hiatus before the new writer could start the real work, and no absolute deadline. None of the pressure came from the publisher, it's really all an issue they felt from the fanbase (though I guess Harriet also felt pressure not to monopolize Sanderson's time for too many years too, especially once they realized the project would demand much more time than foreseen).

Sanderson really didn't get enough time to analyse the material properly before the announcements were made. As soon as he signed or almost, Harriet made her plans public. He and Harriet realized fairly fast in the process this would take much longer to write, and that Sanderson could not stick to the "one book" plan of Jordan, but they had committed themselves to a 2009 deadline, and when out of their way to stick to it. Not only that, but all their plans and work methods were geared toward completing AMOL as one book, and were not so well suited to writing it as a trilogy. Sanderson is not a newbie writer, he would have worked quite differently from the start had he planned to write three books. It's the damned deadline that forced him to stop writing when he was barely beginning and make a book out of the material he had, which was just two POV clusters (Egwene and Rand) out of five, and only for the first two acts of the finale. He's not incompetent, he found a way to shape the material written into a novel, all the structual problems came from the material he had not worked on yet... Had he aimed for a split from the start, I have little doubt he would have followed a far more logical approach, to preserve Jordan's dramatic progression, sticking to the chronology far more. Sanderson didn't even have the choice to start with Mat and Perrin instead (which would have been more logical, as what happens to them don't have the global impact on the story, or the dramatic structure, the events happening to Rand, and to a lesser measure to Egwene, had)

Harriet rationalized that Jordan would not have been able to stick to one book either. She is probably right, publishing wise, but I'm convinced Jordan had he remained healthy, would have stuck to the plan to write this as one book, and make all this a non issue literary speaking, strictly a publishing problem that would be sorted later, when he was done. But of course, even if had he decided along the way to split it and make it two novels (He's long-winded, but he's far more economical than Sanderson in the number of episodes he chose to show "on screen" to develop a story. I think it's near impossible he would have written three books out of AMOL) his grasp of the story left to tell would have made him split it quite differently from the way Sanderson did, which was not determined by storytelling or dramatic structure, but strictly under the pressure to stick to a deadline, which they could meet only by making a novel out of the material he already had written (and a few additional chapters that are actually pretty bad/useless as Sanderson apporached them as "prequels" not to damage the beginning of the next book). It wasn't a literary decision, it was damage control.

It's really sad they put that additional pressure on themselves lik this. They made their job far more complex, while in fact most of the fanbase would have been supportive.

I'm sure Sanderson would have made a much better global job at maintaining the standards of Jordan had he been allowed to finish the whole thing before publishing anything. The books would have been shorter too. TGS and TOM both have tons of redundant scenes that would no doubt have been reworked if Sanderson could look at the whole before editing and tighening this up. For one thing, it would have been much easier to ensure all the details were in there. That's how Jordan did it, starting with the key events or key moments around which important aspects for characters, or important events revolved, then he fitted in all the rest, and fleshed everything out. Sanderson could not write like this. It's not his method, and it wasn't his material either. The only way to emulate that was the approach he chose, to rough draft each cluster, smooth out their individual problems, then step back and polish the whole as one global novel and fill all the gaps. He was never supposed to be forced to stop after two clusters and polish them up for publication, with only a very rough outline of what else what happening, and no concrete vision of the problems he would face later with those storylines.