The subject that the structure of the first two books has suffered from the way they were split was raised with Brandon a few times. He didn't go and said it sucked or they were not happy, he said he's conscious it's altered the story to re order it and he said the structure of TOM was much harder to construct then he ever thought it would be when they decided to split the book as they did. He underestimated how much was left in secondary storylines that would need to be fitted in TOM because of the way he built TGS.

He said there's no chance of them going back and reordering the books for print, which is only logical because each is structured as a novel. He would not end up with a third novel merely by adding up all the scenes from one and the other. To make it all fit as one novel, they would be rewrites, re pacing, editing to be done. The final result wouldn't be just TGS+TOM, it would be a a different novel, with many tweaks. Tons of people would accuse them of doing this for the money, or be outraged they didn't do this the first time around and now you have to pay for the "better" edition.

Brandon just said it's probable the three books get released as a boxset down the line (likely trade format, not HC) but not with any change - that at best a reordering might be done as a ebook eventually (but it's highly improbable they actually do it).

That's not quite the same as building the novel this way from start to finish, which would require a lot of extra editing/polishing to optimize the text as one novel.

No need for an ebook to merely get this approximation of how RJ might have built the story. It will be easy if cumbersome to do it now, one just have to take a few notes beforehand and establish a reading order for chunks of storylines and to switch between reading TGS and TOM following that order.

That won't even be close to discovering the story the first time that way however - that ship has sailed - so it's a bit useless except as a kind of academic exercize, at least for me as I can have a fairly good idea of how it would have felt as a whole by doing the same mentally, without having to actually re read the scenes in chronological order...




Not a chance of them doing an internet version. Harriet's threshold of tolerance for the digital publishing stops at ebooks, and even then Brandon said she doesn't like releasing ebooks much. Tor's thinking is a lot more advanced on ebooks and online content (they let Brandon publish his annotations etc), but Harriet is more conservative. Brandon said there's very little chance she ever lets him do annotations for WOT. In part it's out of reluctance to have her copyrighted material so accessible and easy to redistribute, and in part it's because RJ let no one read drafts, not even Harriet. That makes her very reluctant to release anything RJ himself would not have agreed was in a state to be shown publicly, and Brandon thus couldn't do annotations without her being very involved in the project, approving everything first. Finally, there's the fact Harriet intends to mine RJ's notes massively for her encyclopedia, and until this has fully taken form, she keeps "first dig" on everything.

Brandon said the only possible scenario at this point is that he might convince Harriet to publish a book they'd co-write about the writing of AMOL (I mean AMOL as the 3 books) eventually, with commentaries/annotations, excerpts from RJ's notes, carefully selected drafts etc. and so on. That book would be printed, not on the web, and its sale would justify putting the hard work Harriet herself would have to do on the project.

Bottomline: Brandon is a teacher of literature and likes to use his work to educate, and as a writer he's very candid and open about his writing process. He's even very open about publishing whole first drafts for free before a novel is released (despite being told he was nuts by Tor), or with participating in free ebook promotions etc.

Harriet has different views.



Many publishers with many authors would not have allowed it. Most publishers don't even let writers decide how long they have to tell a story. Brandon has a far more typical contract with Tor for his books. Jordan's was quite different. Brandon works with a Tor editor, and needs to stick to a target word count range set by Tor, and to deadlines. If he's short of the minimum, he needs to expand or negotiate with his editor for a shorter book, and if he's above the limit, he needs to cut or get his editor to agree the story needs a larger book.

That wasn't true for RJ. He did pretty much what he wanted to do with WOT at that point (perhaps since the early days, I honestly have no idea), content wise. That's how his contract was. Harriet had been Tor's main editor before she returned to the south, and Doherty trusted her so Tor let RJ work with his own editor instead of Tor's own. RJ wrote the books as he wished, delivered them when he was done, and all the creative/story editing, ordering of chapters and so on was done "at home" with Harriet instead of with editors working for Tor. He basically sold finished books to Tor for publishing. That's why he could go and tell Tor (and the public): the next one will be huge but it will be the last - Tor will just have to invent a new way to bind it if necessary (which was of course jest... RJ wanted the readers to understand he was committed to write AMOL as one story, he wasn't about to open Pandora's box with purely theorical possibilties like being forced to publish it in volumes and not all at once. That's the kind of decisions that would only have come at the end).

Only when RJ/Harriet were done was a WOT book sent to Tor, the Tor editors did the more technical editing (typos, inconsistencies etc., aka the line editing) and comments, with Harriet and RJ. For the three BS/RJ books, given the tight deadline imposed by Harriet they decided to take no chance and let Maria Simmons (and Harriet) do that process with Brandon instead of the Tor editors who used to work with RJ. She assisted RJ for minutia issues and had worked far more closely even with Brandon, so she could do the process faster.

The publishing decisions were handled between Tor and RJ, and now between Tor and Harriet/the succession (which Harriet heads). It's Harriet who decided to split AMOL in three books, it's Harriet who decided when the first one would be delivered to Tor (and who decided to announce the release so far in advance - in the press release from Tor it was even formulated that way.. Harriet McDougal announces that she's chosen BS, that the book would be out by X etc.), Tor and her decided on the release date. It's even Harriet who decides if the prologue will or won't be published as an ebook teaser. RJ had chosen to sell the prologues of WH/COT/KOD to another publisher interested in releasing them as ebooks - it's only for whole WOT books he was bound to go through Tor, that gives you an idea of how much control he had over his ouput. For TGS/TOM Tor made an offer for the prologue and Harriet decided to go through them now.

It's also Harriet who decided that she wouldn't deliver the last book in time for the 2012 christmas season, which took Brandon(and probably Tor) by surprise as for months he had been swearing Tor would prefer to get it out for the holidays and Harriet would no doubt agree to deliver it to them in time for a november release at the latest possible time, probably sooner. Harriet decided she wanted to work slower and longer and she picked the latest available date that would still allow Tor to publish the book in winter 2013 instead of spring 2013 (in between is a low season for book sales).

But that's all immaterial anyway. Jordan knew perfectly were he was going story-wise with AMOL and more importantly he was advancing on it with a structure in mind. He would have had nothing to publish before he was finished even once he realized his word count was already way too high for a single book, because he didn't work at all the way Brandon chose to work. Jordan started with the beginning and the ending of his books. He wrote the prologue of AMOL in full, he wrote the ending of AMOL (the ending of the last battle would be more proper as he planned a long epilogue afterward. When RJ spoke of the famous last scene, he was referring to the last scene before the epilogue, Brandon has since confirmed that fact). He took many decisions regarding the post LB epilogue, ie: how the story ended for tons of individual characters and issues (some had options, depending on how things evolved in the writing), so he'd know where he was heading. Then he started, as he apparently always did, by drafting several key scenes all over the book, for many characters as it wasn't problematic for him to switch between 'voices", it was intimate and for so long with all of them. In some cases, he wrote full scenes (examples of that would be the epiphany, the Ghenji episode etc.), in other cases he wrote all the key dialogue/inner motivations for a scene and waited to decide in what setting this scene would take place until he'd shaped the secondary scenes connected to that. He then wrote the in-between scenes expanding from the key ones, again not in order. When he was all done, he did several (usually over 10) passes of polishing of his writing, and eventually he sat with Harriet and they decided how to best order the scenes.

Even if he was forced to split AMOL he would never have been in Brandon's far more difficult position to do it.

Brandon wrote by POV clusters, because he feared he could not keep the character voices consistent otherwise, and because he needed to analyze/study each voice in detail by re reading several chapters from their POVs, and couldn't keep track of more than one at once.

Jordan rather jumped from one character to another, expanding from the key scenes, coming back to fill the gaps later. Brandon's vision of the final book was thus much sketchier than Jordan's. He finished Egwene's up to Merrilor, which was the easiest because RJ had drafted many scenes in full and outlined in details many others. For Rand there wasn't much for the early book, and it's mostly Brandon who fleshed it out from outines and notes. For TOM there wasn't much aside from the ouline/notes for Perrin, but RJ was far more advanced with pre-TG Mat scenes (and TG scenes too, apparently), having several written in full like for Egwene.


When Brandon and Harriet decided to split the book as they did, Brandon had only complete the first draft for the storylines of Egwene and Rand up to Merrilor. He had reached the deadline set to finish the whole of AMOL in time, and Harriet and him sat down to evaluate the damages, with Doherty to advise. Brandon knew that material really well as he had work intensively on it for over a year by then. He had a much vaguer idea of what the full storylines of Perrin and Mat would be like as they were not written, especially Perrin who was very sketchy. For Perrin he had tons of notes incl. key moments but very little was more than sketched by RJ and he had to create all the details of his storyline, like what happened betwen those key moments/events RJ intended. For Mat he had many finished scenes, but beginning and end, not the middle stuff with Elayne. Elayne was part of a fifth cluster regrouping all the secondary characters POV and secondary storylines to develop, which was even sketchier as RJ typically integrated that stuff later in the game, and for several players Brandon had nothing but where they were in KOD and what RJ intended for them in the epilogue of AMOL (plus what's in their character file), and Brandon had not worked on creating their storylines yet.

That made it extremely hard to make an enlightened decision to split AMOL properly in three books. When they read what he had done, looked at the outline, Harriet and Doherty decided that they would have to split AMOL, forcibly. Their opinion was that they didn't have a first book and wouldn't have one in time for the date Harriet had announced. It's Brandon who suggested that they may alter the timelines planned by RJ a bit to synchronize what he had writte for Egwene and Rand, write scenes from the other clusters (foe eg: Tuon's scenes in TGS) that were needed, and create kind of prequel scenes for Perrin and Mat so they'd be in the book.



That was up to RJ, not Tor, much like Brandon has commented recently that by refusing to deliver AMOL in time for the holidays Harriet was told by the publisher she'd likely lose money doing time, but she preferred to take the extra time.

AMOL in three volumes would not have been sold at the price of one WOT book anyway, they'd be sold as three books, which is why publishers prefer to leave months between each volume, because it tends to spread out the sales of volumes 2-3 otherwise (not that people won't buy them eventually, but many choose or are forced not to do it at the time of release but rather in their own time) which affects the best-selling status of a book, which in turn affects its exposure and global sales. That's the argument Harriet also uses to refuse to let Tor publish the ebook edition at the same time as the hardcover one (which is what they advise and would prefer) as Harriet is concerned with the fact too many best-selling lists still don't comptabilize sales in the ebook format or list them apart.

Brandon said recently he's managed to get her to reduce the delay more, but not to publish the ebook at the same time (he's also trying to find a solution so people who bought the printed version can get the ebook for free, but apparently there's no viable one in sight that would be acceptable to Tor and Harriet).



But that's the opposite of what I think they should have done.

No one would have structured the book as Brandon did, least of all Brandon himself, in other circumstances. What he proposed was a last resort scenario as he sensed Harriet wasn't happy to announce the book would be split and beside, the first one wouldn't even come out on the date promised for the full book originally.

I'm not even debating if it was or not a good decision to get something out on that date. It's perfectly possible it would have been a PR mess and publishing wise they made the best decision. I'm strictly speaking of what would have been best for the story itself.

It was a very risky gamble to decide to re structure someone else's story as they did. Brandon was focussed on what he had written, and had a sketchy idea of if book 2 would actually work. He had a better idea for Mat/Perrin, but he had obviously forgotten about many secondary storylines (and struggled to keep some of them in TOM intact, for instance he had to completely alter the timelines to be able to move half of the BT story to AMOL). A good example of the consequences of publishing TGS before finishing to at least draft everything up to Merrilor and assess what might be missing in there was how the "usual suspects" around Egwene got very few appearances, and how Alviarin for instance vanished without a trace after a short appearance in a scene written by RJ. It's not conceivable that RJ could have evacuated Alviarin in the book that brought down the BA, nor that what he had built to with both Alviarin and the BA hunters through the prologues lead to nothing. TGS was really barebone in that sense, Brandon didn't have time to go deeper in Egwene's storyline and dig up the stuff that didn't concern the progression of Egwene's story or Siuan's story. He did try to patch some of that up in TOM (not much, it was for the most part too late). There's no massive plot holes (a few smaller ones, though - for instance Egwene,s storyline vs. the BT envoys from the Reds and the rebels - one of the few confirmed to belong to cluster 5, is very poor. Brandon had to alter the timelines in order to push the BT stuff to TOM, and now it takes way, way too long for the rebels and Reds to start worrying about their envoys, and for the rebel ones who were stopped outside the walls to report that back to their Hall. It stopped making any sense when Brandon had to fit in the fact Nynave got Lan's bond after being raised, and off course she simply Traveled to the BT and found Myrelle and the rest outside the walls there, not allowed inside....). So we really got shortchanged on the WT storylines, and by and large that's due to the fact Brandon approached AMOL as one book and worked with that in mind, then a third in the work, it was decided to make a novel essentially out of what he had first drafted, with most of the short remaining time before the deadline for TGS being devoted to fill in the essential missing scenes and creating prequels for Perrin and Mat.

That's was far from ideal, and Brandon himself said it - not very long before the book split, he was saying that if it was his decision, he'd much prefer to draft the remaining two main clusters and integrate the material from the "miscellaneous fiftth cluster" with that than start polishing the first two clusters right away - that he'd prefer to do that only once more of the pre-Merrilor story was put in shape, but Harriet would decide. Which for the sake of the story would of course have been infinitely better.

It wouldn't have been difficult to "fix" TGS to avoid the problems found in that book and more to the point, to avoid all the damage control and compromises they'd be forced to do with TOM. Yes, it did start by letting Brandon finish drafting all the storylines up to the point where they merge (as he wanted to do all along). Where to split between books 2-3 was never much in question, Brandon was stopping the clusters at Merrilor all along, even without knowing what's next it's obvious even to us it's the natural point for the start of the third book. It will probably be much better than TOM and TGS. Sanderson isn't an amateur, and his books don't have glaring structural problems. To get a book out, he didn't have any other option than to use the material written for Rand's and Egwene's storylines. It did look like a good idea to regroup Rand and Egwene, and Brandon did come out with a pretty good book there. On its own. It even made sense to end the book how Brandon ended it at first. After reading TOM though, it didn't make nearly as much sense, for the price of giving Rand the epiphany climax so early is really high, and has a lot of impact on TOM. It's fairly similar to how RJ himself screwed up and decided that the second half of WH would complete Rand's storyline and bring the Cleansing. He realized he had screwed up only while writing COT, when he saw he couldn't possibly get to the final book in with that one (more precisely, RJ just said he made an error to start each storyline on the same day - that having done that wouldn't let him advance the story as far as he thought in and when it dawned on him too much was already written to start again). He ended up with a transitional book on all fronts, with Rand virtually stalled for two books because RJ had advanced him too close in WH to the point where he wanted him to start in his series' finale (which was moving to Arad Doman, as we know now). He thought he could then bring everyone up to the same point in the next book, it turned out he couldn't.

RJ's bad call more or less created frustration, after a key event had taken place the main story was put on the backburner.

Brandon made a similar bad call, but in his case the result is more that except for key events (eg: Ghenji, the Hammer) RJ had intended the storylines of Mat/Perrin prior to the LB to support the stories of Rand/Egwene, and all lot of their impact was designed with in mind the fact in the two main storylines, everything was going more badly with every scene and the world was now on the brink of disaster. Egwene and Rand had the "big stuff" - whole nations at stake, the future of the Tower, the Seanchan; Perrin was to provide early on a solid dose of extra mundane frustration, for the insane triviality of what he was caught with. It was like a nightmare. Perrin had suddenly solved pretty much everything with which Jordan had intentionally frustrated us earlier (the Faile obsession, Faile's jealousy and how people expected her to overeact about the rumours re: Berelain and so on, including Masema that surprisingly got killed, and Asunawa). And then, Jordan pulled a quick one: you thought it was all over and I was out of ideas to block Perrin? Galad's intransigeance, an insane trial, the dreamspike... Perrin really had a support role, providing short bursts of frustration, to increase the impression of downward spiral in Egwene's and Rand's stories. It was similar with Mat, also frustrantingly blocked in almost trivial matters such as a clerk failing to tell something to Elayne. Where Perrin provided frustration though, Mat would have ligthened things up a bit and provided comic relief as Rand and Egwene's storylines were going really dark. Mat and Perrin's storylines were not designed to work well on their own. Brandon was even forced to stretch Perrin's to get it to book-size, spacing things a lot and having many redundant scenes. And most of all, the two support storylines didn't work well if Rand's epiphany is already known to the reader. The cumulative downward spiral effect planned by Jordan no longer worked in TOM, the suspense was gone too. We got a "streamlined" version of it with TGS instead.

Had Brandon finished the four storylines before making his decision on how to split the books, it would have been extremely apparent (not that I don't think Brandon with the outline in hands suspected it to a large extent long before that, going with only Egwene-Rand was a last resort forced on him as the only way to get a book out). It would have also been apparent that to remain closer to RJ's intent, it was better to end TGS with the Seanchan attack (not the reunification/WT BA purge) and Rand's "disappearance" from Tear. Just that would have given fsr more impact to the storylines of Perrin and Mat, and would have let Brandon keep them shorter, closer probably to RJ's intented importance. By mid book, he would have built to the epiphany/reunification, ending on Ghenji, Perrin meeting Elayne, Egwene meeting Rand and so on.

Of course, that's just a scenario where the clusters for Egwene-Rand are more polished and can be finished faster and TGS would have been delayed only by 8 months to a year, because ideally the all the four storylines should have progressed in parallel as RJ intended. That of course left no obvious place where to split the first two thirds of AMOL into two novels... but that's precisely what RJ said all along and why he insisted so much he needed to tell it all in just one huge book... The only real way to make it work would have been to split AMOL in volumes in the end. That way RJ (or Brandon) wouldn't have to make any comprise to get proper endings and to alter the pacing to create a real novel, because when you're done you simply pick volume 2 and continue the story as if it was all one novel...