Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

There's a good chance that the book cover will be shown this weekend, Nynaeve will be TINY in the back flap.

During the A Memory of Light reading/panel this was sadly not confirmed—the cover is ready but not for viewing at this time. (see Marie's write-up of the A Memory of Light reading for more details).

Moiraine's blue stone is a dig at Marion Zimmer Bradley.

When RJ was working on the first Conan book, he got the movie script and was told to stick as close to it as possible (though he did alter some things and later got approached with "man, I HATE what they did to your book"). After the book was published and the movie out, he one day got a letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley threatening to sue RJ for copyright infringement because one of his characters had a (blue) stone hanging on her forehead. RJ then sent a letter back referring her to the studios and the original script in which the stone appeared. The lawsuit never happened and Moiraine has a blue stone on her forehead.

The last battle strategy and body count were in RJ's notes, the specifics not. So he did specify who'd die but not how. Help was gotten from Bernard Cornwell. (woohoo!)

RJ set up the whole layout of the battle, who would be where and who would not make it out but he kept insisting that he'd write the Last Battle on the fly, so to speak. Apparently Bernard Cornwell lives kind of close to their place so one day Harriet asked him over for coffee and he had a few good pointers for the battle (which I personally think is great because his battle-style has a very similar immediacy in scale as RJ displayed in Dumai's Wells and while I also think that BS writes good battles, he's better at the one-on-one type things and not so good with the massive event that the Last Battle would be).