Great. That'd be more than good enough to describe the problems to Maria.



Exactly. Bryne would not let him come to the foot of the bridge to put a barricade there either, so it can't be us who misunderstand where it is... There's really no point to a barricade, period. Not one made by Chubain. It's Bryne who would have a barricade set up at the foot of each bridge, with his sentries looking at the walls/gates. If Chubain has an outpost, it would have been at the top of the arch on the bridge, to keep an eye on the negotiations that used to take place in tents at the foot of the Alindaer bridge. It would be for the form, really, as if the rebels decided to move against the negotiators, they could just as easily capture the outpost as well: bind them with air and they can't report, and from a quarter mile away the people on the wall may not notice something is amiss immediately.



You mean the bridge or moving Bryne's tent back with the Aes Sedai? I think in both cases these are simply errors. I wouldn't underestimate the massive burden of details Brandon had to juggle with and the extremely limited time he had for research. It seems that himself and the editors have focussed a lot of their efforts on getting the characters right and that left them little time to question the logic of everything in the scenes Brandon wrote. If they all thought Bryne was surrounding the AS (and in Salidar, he was), they may simply not have thought to double-check and find the one paragraph in which RJ said otherwise. I think a lot of the little mistakes in TGS are probably things Maria/Allan had wrong from memory, things they didn't think to look into because nothing felt wrong. After they've worked on Brandon's text for a while, they would not question that anymore either. It's not the only mistake like this. In Perrin's storyline, they failed to explain why Perrin was still at Malden hours later when in KOD he had ordered the refugees to move north immediately. It would be simple to correct this by adding in TGS that after he got the report the Aiel had stopped, Perrin stopped the rush to move out and re organized the departure more properly, taking the time to pick all they could from the town, etc.

Maria has also hinted that RJ's notes are not always a masterpiece of organization, that he did not always kept them up to date them either when he didn't have to consult them anymore. It's not necessarily to know where to find everything to verify each detail. He also kept notes that Maria kept filed for him (character files etc.) and that she knows well, and work notes that he used himself, like his Aes Sedai catalogue with the basics about each character he needed when writing. he used that instead of asking Maria all the time. One thing the glitches in TGS and the signings have made clear over the years is that Jim had one hell of an impressive memory. I don't think he often had to ask Maria "on which side of the river is Gawyn already?". I think it was more like "I need to refresh my memory about a detail about Dorlan. Could you bring the TV and vicinity file and find me the paragraphs in which I've referenced it". Maria is apparently an expert at telling which chapter and page something happens in WOT. I don't think with RJ she had to worry if he was consistent in his descriptions...

I think Jordan's team of editors, while having an amazing knowledge of the series, got a bit overwhelmed for TGS, in which each and every detail could possibly be wrong. I don't think they were quite used to that with RJ, nor with Harriet asking for so many changes. Worldbuilding, OP, vocabulary, character voices, plot details and consistency, backstory, settings, timeline... that was like climbing Dragonmount. My feeling is that they caught by far the worst problems in the book but several little things escaped their eyes.

I'll be very happy if they remedy to the few problems that are left for the paperback, but I'm not too critical of their work. On the whole, they got a massive percentage of it dead on, and it's fairly impressive already. Realistically, they can't spend much longer on editing either. They already invest far more efforts and time than for any other RJ book, and spending 3-6 extra months would be a lot of money. I get the feeling they might spend more on TOM, though. They know they've missed things and it probaly irritates them as much as it does for us. They also know they won't get away with much



He worries or worried about that himself. From signings (incl. a brief conversation I had with him at one of them) I can tell you efforts are made about this - we'll see the results. For TGS he didn't have time (or the need) and relied on the editors, but he was already being "educated" for TOM and AMOL. Allan is another military buff and happens to be the person with whom RJ used to love to discuss his weapons and military stuff, and military things in WOT. Allan knows very well RJ's reference library for this, and he even knows which battles or elements of military history RJ thought of using as inspiration for this and that event in AMOL (he knows on which sources RJ based this and that too). Brandon said Allan would be more involved for the military stuff in TOM/AMOL (at the time he was saying he wasn't needed so much on that matter for TGS) and he had prepared for him a big "to read" pile of books from RJ's library, including classics on strategy and so on.

We'll see. To be honest, I understand perfectly your concerns and on other "historical" topics I would feel exactly the same way (RJ himself has done a few silly things in some areas, or perhaps he cheated knowing this or that was a bit unrealistic), but I'll probably miss a lot of the military mistakes myself. Misused crossbows or far-fetched actions with pikes etc. go right past me, usually - and even for ranges and stuff I need to look into books to know if RJ had done it by the book or cheated. I see the really silly stuff (the downhill charge in The Two Towers and so on) but for the details... I most often miss or overlook them. I have a good collection of early modern military reference books, but my interest in those matters is restrained (a bit like Verin) and I use them only for reference, not to read from cover to cover. If I come upon a battle description that I don't get in a history book, I'll pick the right book and look what this or that tactic of pikemen or musketeers is all about, or I'll pick my book on fortification if I don't get something in a fortress' description, or when I get annoyed at not remembering what a midshipman or a bosun does exactly on a ship.




To the people who know enough about that to be bothered by blatant errors, certainly. Personally I worry more that Sanderson won't be able to emulate RJ's skills at chaotic battle descriptions, or won't be as good picking up the right angles and POVs to carry this or that effect/feeling about fighting as RJ would have done it. RJ's battles were often so great because he avoided too omniscient POVs. He stuck to the limited perspectives the characters are involved in, going more with speed and chaos and the emotions/drama than the whole military reconstruction. I suspect a lot of that came from the fact he knew how it felt to be in the middle of the fire, and how much you didn't see.



Yes, that's exactly what I think, and why I think even with a convincing explanation of what they did wrong they might give up on trying to fix it, especially now that in the end it didn't have impact on the plot because the battle was never fought, and it's no longer relevant to the other books.

Of course, if they fix it it's great.



I hope they have the time for more editing, and of course they have more experience now. They all know what they've missed the last time. It's new for them to bear so much of the final book on their own shoulders instead of more simply assisting RJ in his work. They had perhaps somethign that was 80% right and the man with them for the last 20%, and now I don't know.. they need to find and collect research material, dig up to answer questions all the time, can't trust that the writer has the right minor character in a scene, understand a detail of backstory right, uses the proper word for this and that (a lot of stole for shawl and vice versa in TGS notably). Maria has to handle the timeline issues because RJ's timeline grids are so complex Brandon can't use them (Maria herself once said she starts with Steven Cooper's far easier to use timeline to find stuff and goes to RJ's to counter-verify...), and she's the one who also keeps maps of the positions of every one day-by-day because Brandon gets lost otherwise too. I think it's pretty damn amazing that Brandon manages to write these books at all given the little time he was given to do his research. I dread to think what would have happened with a writer who didn't already know the characters, plots and settings as well as Brandon did.