Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Harriet read the first scene of the prologue of A Memory of Light, which was from the point of view of Bayrd, a member of Jarid Sarand's army, whose family had remained loyal to House Sarand for years. The scene told of the army's suffering as a result of starvation (they had resorted to boiling bits of grass and leather to try to eat) and also due to a bubble of evil which had turned all the metal in the camp soft and pliable. Jarid Sarand, however, was convinced that the hardships the army had been struggling with were the work of Elayne and her Aes Sedai 'witches' (Jarid seemed just a little bit looney). Because all the metal weapons were no longer useful, Bayrd resorted to fashioning a spear point from slate to replace a metal one. The scene ended with Bayrd restraining Jarid by tying him to a tree and the remainder of Sarand's army leaving to head north to fight for Andor in the Last Battle.

The excerpt from the Prologue of A Memory of Light was released a few days later by Tor.

Harriet answered no.

To be clear, the question was were there any plans to do the outriggers/prequels, and she said no, there are no plans. She still hasn't given a straight answer; I paid very close attention to the wording.

Peter first spoke in general terms about Brandon's writing routine. He said that Brandon typically gets up around noon, writes from about 1-4pm, spends time with family and stuff, then goes back to writing from about 8pm-4am, and finally sleeps from about 4am to noon. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Peter also said that Brandon has a treadmill desk, and he frequently works at that when he's home or by one of the fireplaces he has in his house. Harriet then noted that she loves fireplaces and wanted to know whether Brandon's were wood-burning or gas. Peter said they're gas fireplaces.

Then Harriet described the editing process for A Memory of Light. She said that Brandon has completed the first draft (as was previously reported). Team Jordan is currently working on reviewing the first draft and making suggestions for corrections and edits. They have divided the manuscript into 9 sections plus the epilogue for editing purposes; Team Jordan has sent the edits for parts 1-6 to Brandon and are currently working on edits for the later sections. [Brandon recently tweeted that he is about halfway done with the second draft, and it is going well so far.]

With regard to the editing duties, Harriet primarily oversees the characterizations and prose, Maria deals with continuity issues, and Alan deals with military stuff, geography, and the timeline. Harriet also said that she and Brandon have had some "animated" conversations about whether or not to cut some specific scenes.

After all the suggested edits for the first draft are sent to Brandon and he has made the revisions, then presumably Team Jordan will review the second draft and provide another round of suggestions for revisions. The beta reader phase has to be fit in there somewhere, too. Ultimately, Harriet said that the goal for getting a final draft to Tor is June 15, 2012. That should give Tor plenty of time to get the book out by January 2013.

Harriet told about an incident she has described before from when she was writing the blurb for the dust jacket of The Dragon Reborn and finally realized that RJ intended Callandor to be an analog of the sword in the stone. She yelled down to RJ, "You son of a ****, you've done it to me again!"

Maria Simons

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Harriet indicated that the Whelan cover art is actually done and originally was going to be revealed at JordanCon. (Whelan was tapped to do the cover of the ebook of A Memory of Light before Darrell K. Sweet passed away.) However, because Darrell K. Sweet, Jr., was kind enough to bring to JordanCon several of his father's original paintings for the cover art of the previous books, as well as the preliminary version of Sweet's A Memory of Light cover, it was decided to celebrate the work of Darrell K. Sweet at JordanCon and to wait for a while before the Whelan cover art is revealed.

It was also mentioned that Whelan initially sent a number of versions of the cover art to Team Jordan and Tor for review before he produced the final version for A Memory of Light. The scene depicted is a different one than that shown in Darrell K. Sweet's preliminary artwork. Also, at one point it was mentioned that Whelan sent out a query to someone asking, "What's a ter'angreal?"

The preliminary version of Darrell K. Sweet's cover for A Memory of Light may be see here, along with some of his other Wheel of Time covers.