Nor to blame Brandon entirely. All lot of the not optimal decisions were made in difficult circumstances, or only became bad decisions in hindsight long after the fact, or were made under various forms of stress (I wouldn't underestimate the impact of Harriet's loss had on her decisions, for instance how pressured she felt toward RJ and toward the fans, to bring WOT to a timely conclusion) and so on.


She set the schedule (not Tor, she said so herself, that Doherty told her she could wait as long as she needed), that's for sure, and it's been a source of many problems. But she also planned the work timeline for one book, which became three later. For personal reasons and because of the fans, Harriet felt pressure to move ahead as fast as possible with the project. It's understandable, but it's still there want it or not.

OTOH, Sanderson was the writer at the helm, it was his job to evaluate the outline and he grossly underestimated the work to do to flesh it out into a book. That was his call to make as the writer, Harriet had hired him because he was a writer and she needed a writer to finish (that's what she answered when he asked why she didn't finish it herself, that this wasn't just an editing job, that she needed a real writer) He certainly told Harriet at some point that yes he could do it all under her suggested deadline. It turned out he needed 3 times that. That's not much to do with her. Of course, it's was an all too easy mistake to make. The decisions appeared to have be made really fast and within weeks after hiring Brandon, Harriet went forward and announced it, and put a deadline for publication. That wasn't very wise, as time would tell. Had he taken the time to expand the outline in full and fill all the gaps, Brandon would probably have realized earlier this couldn't possibly be written as one book, and this most likely would have lead to meetings with Harriet to analyse the outline and decide beforehand how best to split the material... before writing anything.

So they all share responsabilities for this, but the circumstances they worked in explain a lot of it too.


As for editing Brandon vs. editing RJ (and the other writers she's edited... she's got some pretty big SF names/titles under her belt, like Ender's Game) Harriet didn't have much choice but to modify her editing method (where she only starts reading working once a full novel is submitted to her), to adapt it to the very unusual context. Rather than being just an editor, she had to guide Sanderson with the characters (notably.. and the tone, and the style, and the storytelling and so on), which isn't at all part of her normal responsabilities as editor of WOT, but because with RJ dead, she was the person the most intimate with the series and the one who had to do this. She couldn't let Brandon write full storylines, only to tell him afterward this and that was out of character for Rand and he needed to alter the story to change that (and scrap X chapters as a result, for e.g.), and he had to rewrite most of Mat because he was off, and he was completely off with Aviendha (she had Brandon rewrite her a few times before she was "convinced" by his Aviendha), and she thought he didn't understand Tuon's psychology, etc., etc. Had she not bent her rules to work like that, it was a recipe for a near complete rewrite down the line. She had little choice, she had to step in often and much earlier, read ongoing drafts, and guide him to rewrite before he had gone too far. Of course, this means she was pretty much as involved as Brandon with the material, and she gradually lost her usual perspective where she could look at the whole with fresh eyes, and it was edited storyline by storyline, and she was really intimate with the story (too much, for an editor) when she could finally read the whole book together at last. That probably impaired to an extent her ability to see clearly what worked and what didn't. It's not so much her fault (though this created various editing problems in the final books, and I don't mean wrong ajah and minutia mistakes like this... this isn't Harriet's job.) and what the circumstances imposed on her and Brandon.

Then for the book's re structuring, they share responsability too, but it's ultimately Brandon's responsability as the writer again. He's the storyteller, as editor her main job is to advise, look at the whole and tell/ask the writer stuff like "I see where you are going with this, but at the end this is coming really a bit out of nowhere, this should be better fleshed out as you can't understand the motivations well enough - or do you want the motivations to remain obscure, maybe? Or "you really need to explain XYZ beforehand, because your scene as written lacks internal logic. Why is it night all of a sudden, and where are these two coming from. It's a bit confusing." or "In chapter 26, you say X is well aware of this and that and it's her habit to always look at all the factors. Is this the truth or just her perception, because it's supposed to be the truth, then it's really not the impression of her I get in chapter 34...", "what exactly happened with the OP in that scene, am I supposed to be mystified or not, because if if it's supposed to be obvious I don't really understand, you should make it plainer". It's stuff like this a creative editor does. She doesn't take the place of the writer or rewrite the story for him, she rather helps to ensure the writer is succeeding with his intentions for the story. She's kind of an expert reader. It's fairly unnatural for an editor to work without having read the complete manuscript, as then she lacks the proper perspective on the full story to do her work. It think Harriet was perhaps also too used to RJ and how much he was in control of his story and characters. She seems to have overestimated Brandon in this respect.

Then, there was the book split. As he explained, when Brandon reached the deadline by which he was supposed to be done completely with AMOL, he had a meeting with Harriet and she brought in Tom Doherty (who had read nothing until then) as and additional advisor, to settle on what to do. Harriet and Doherty were of the opinion nothing could be done and they had to give up on their plans to have the book out by next fall. They had to split the book in three volumes to begin with - Harriet and Brandon have messed up in the evalution of the outline, and it was impossible to have the first volume ready for release a year later (in other words, Harriet's plan then seemed to have been to let Brandon complete at least the two remaining storylines, Mat's and Perrin's, so the split books could follow the story chronologically) . It's Brandon as the writer who said "wait, perhaps we could still have a book out next year. Maybe I have a solution if we used only the two storylines I have finished and played with the timelines a bit etc. we could make a book out of that, and a second with the other storylines, etc". Harriet wasn't immediately convinced, she asked Brandon to work out the details and get back to her and they'd make the final decision. He did, and she finally gave the green light. Of course she had the last word and could have said "it's too risky, write Mat and Perrin up to the LB first and we'll see". That would have been wise. The self-imposed (and perceived, from the fans) pressure to have a book out the next fall must have influenced both of them. IMO, this is the decision that had the most impact on quality. Brandon rushed to write a few prequel chapters for Mat and Perrin (departing from the original outline, as he couldn't get into the real story in this book) just so they could appear in the book (and the whole idea behind this wasn't for the sake of the book, it was because Brandon and Harriet knew some fans would be outraged if these two were not at all in the books). In any case, aside from the prologue scenes from RJ, it gave us completely useless Perrin chapters, and a pretty bad and off-character Mat side adventure (I remain pretty convinced RJ's planned first scene with Mat in AMOL was to have surprised us, by having him already in Caemlyn, where we learned Elayne didn't answer his letters and Verin had sped him up to the city by showing up unexpectdly, and forced him to agree to terms and to remain in Caemlyn or open the letter etc. That was probably that chapter in the tavern.)

One thing to keep in mind is that once the decision was made to stop writing and work to finish what existed as TGS - and it was already getting pretty tight and rushed if they wanted a book out the next fall - neither Harriet nor Brandon had any time to plan ahead. They had to mostly forget what was ahead and focus on shaping TGS and finishing it. Unsurprisingly, most of the problems with TGS (which are really minor compared to TOM) seems to have been with the "rushed" extra chapters and scenes. Aviendha, Tuon, Mat, the minor characters around Egwene and so on... Then, Egwene's storyline lacked polish. The core was all there, and pretty good. What was missing were all the little details that would have made it all more RJ-like: the appearances by the usual minor players (including the glaring omission of any BA in the Tower storyline - no Alviarin and so on (her whole storyline that she was close to getting the BA hunters and SH had tasked her to stop them vanished! No Merrilile, a poor resolution to the whole Talene and the BA hunters, not a single reference from Siuan to her pattern of young sitters, it got a rushed resolution at the end only, not a single clue to who sold Egwene to the Tower, - all the little things RJ had carefully placed over the last few books so Egwene's storyline was more than just about her and there truly were tons of agenda among AS just went down the drain. These omissions would most likely have been spotted in time had Brandon kept writing to the end, it's almost certainly because they suddenly focussed on making TGS out of the core of two storylines and obsessed with keeping the book "tighly focussed on Rand and Egwene" that this ended up forgotten. TGS was pretty good and intense, but at what price was this achieved?

Another "fan service" style bad decision Brandon made was to lack the balls to stop the book where dramatically speaking it should have, and rather provided a "big climax" as if it was a stand-alone novel, so the fans wouldn't lament that TGS didn't solve enough and they had to wait.... He could have the Seanchan battle as the sole climax, but it was a big mistake to have Rand epiphany as one too so early (in TGS, his storyline should have ended with him vanishing from Tear). This would have solved most of the structural problems of TOM. Rand could have returned at the proper place, toward the conclusion of Mat and Perrin's storylines. There was no need then to have Elayne's chapters out of chronological order. Not having written Mat and Perrin yet, Brandon made the very bad call of using the epiphany in TGS when it properly belonged in TOM. Beside solving the structural problems of TOM, this would have preserved the dramatic impact the event was supposed to have. Egwene was Amyrlin, but nothing was solved. Mat was running in circles in Caemlyn, nothing seemed to work, Elayne had let the BA escape and the gholam was after them both. As for Perrin, he was targeted by a Forsaken, his past story with the WC had caught up with him and Rand was MIA and dark, dark, dark... and Aviendha was seing a fairly dark future. Nothing was going as it should have, and Tg was almost there. This would have been far more tensed, and much closer to RJ's original plan, where it the first two thirds of AMOL, as the Dragon grew dark and he was one with the land, it would seem everything was blocked and getting desperate and nothing on the horizon could break that block. Then Rand's epiphany happened, Moiraine got rescued, Perrin won and move to Caemlyn, and TOM ended with Rand's meeting with Egwene which would have had far more dramatic impact placed there, providing a wonderful and natural cliffhanger: I'm going to break the seals and start the LB, gather everyone for a meeting north in X days... Because of the bad call in the division of the books, Brandon and Harriet painted themselves into a corner. TOM rather turned into "the details of how Perrin and Mat reached the fields of Merrilor, now that we know Rand has changed and the biggest problem of the Light pre-TG is already solved". The climax for Rand in TGS was so big, they had to follow it with something, and this could no longer happen too far in TOM because Brandon had put aside part of Egwene's storyline by delaying the confrontation with Mesaana (not doubt because Perrin was involved, and that tied his hands if he put it in TGS when his storyline was not written and still subject to timeline changes and so on ) ... so they felt forced to put it at the beginning, and to accomodate it to create this one month delay between Rand's visit and the meeting at Merrilor, so Brandon could have all those chapters with Mesaana/BA/Egwene and the encounters between Elayne and Egwene, and Gawyn and Elayne etc. The confrontation with the BA really belonged right after the Seanchan attack (why would Mesaana wait so long to strike, when she could have taken Egwene unprepared and weakened and destabilized by the Seanchan attack... this really made no sense). The confrontation should have been in TGS... but Brandon could no longer do that because of the way he divided the books.

Then TOM... TOM is a huge mess of a novel made out of fairly good episodes. Again, the fact Brandon wrote by POV cluster and Harriet edited on the fly so they could meet the self-imposed deadline is probably the most responsible for this. It's when he started TGS that Brandon paid the price for having focussed the first book way too closely on the resolution of Egwene's main story and Rand's story. It's rather obvious as he studied the outline further to plot out where he was going with TOM (which he didn't have time to do, he had to plan how to restructure Egwene and Rand's storyline to get TGS out by a rushed deadline...)Brandon realized there was a lot more "side stories" and plot points to fit in there than he thought, and all the problems arose. I don't think there was really a good way to assemble TOM into a good novel, not when TGS had already been published. TOM was a far more complex book to put together. Brandon rushed to finish writing, and it's pretty obvious Harriet struggled to put it together so it would work. They really had it rough for this one, with a lot of stress and pressure in order to meet the deadline. It's not that it's all terrible, most of the individual episodes are fairly good (better than many in TGS, even). But they had to rush too much to put it together and it's often terribly ackward with scenes out of chronological order and so on, it lacked polish in several places (many redundant scenes that could have been tightened up, especially in Perrin's storyline). I don't think it's Harriet's fault, or at least Brandon shares the blame - and most of all the past decisions made in order to have a book for the fans at the promised time really painted them into a corner. This would not have happened to RJ, or at least it's very doubtful (as it had happened to him before, when he made the bad decision to center WH too much on Rand, and to bring things all the way to the Cleansing... the result of having rushed things to get a big climax was COT, where he realized he had way too much left to tell to reach all the other planned climaxes (the end of KOD) and he had to decide if he stopped and rewrote things to focus more on some characters only, or to stop all storylines in the middle of things, still in his slower first act, and resolve all of them in one last pre TG novel, which became KOD. RJ acknowledged this, but said when he realized this wasn't working as he had planned, he was way too far into the writing of COT and the book already had a deadline, so instead of making a GRRM like decision to rewrite, he finished it. I'm quite convinced what happened with COT/KOD was his main motivation to insist that AMOL must be one book. I think Harriet is right he would probably have been forced to split it, but I'm pretty sure RJ intended to write it all first, before announcing that it would be split in two volumes, part 1 and part 2 (the fact it's become 3 is largely due to differences in the writing styles of Brandon vs. RJ. RJ wrote longer scenes, but they were most often multi-purpose, and he used many ellipses, having many events referred to in passing only instead of writing a full scene for that. Brandon focusses each scene on one plot point, he needs many more scenes than RJ to tell anything as a result, and he has a great deal more events happen "on screen" and developped in full.)

So I'm really happy Harriet and Brandon took a more sensible and usual approach to AMOL. There's a massive amount of things they did right for TOM and TGS. It's just that what they did wrong really showed and decreased a lot the quality of the result of all their efforts. AMOL really stands a chance of being significantly improved and better than TGS/TOM (especially TOM, but it won't be hard to do better thant his one).