On Facebook/Twitter, Sanderson has been saying that he's thinking of abandoning the structure he had before, namely that THE GATHERING STORM is the book with the self-contained story (the long dark night of Rand al'Thor) and TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT is everything else thrown together in a ramshackle fashion to clear the subplots out before AMoL, and wants to give TOWERS a much more cohesive through-line, which seems to be what the audience responded to very well in TGS.