Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Hey, don't publish the picture Gerard gave you. Our house has no wrought-iron gates. Also, no renovation has been done here since the fix-up after Hurricane Hugo several years ago. I kid you not. Poor Gerard got the wrong house. I'm glad you don't intend to publish any address, whether or not it is mine. There are fans who write letters, and then there are fans who show up at the front door unannounced. I hate to be rude to people, but with the time I spend writing, I barely have time for a social life with my friends, and frankly, someone who has managed to track you down is going to think you have cheated them if you scribble your name in their book and say, "Now go away. I'm busy." Believe me.

Well, again, thanks for the letter, Carolyn. Do keep me abreast of what's happening with The Chronicles. I really would like to see copies, if it is possible for you to send them to me care of Tor Books.

Well, it's not all that hard in my head because I grew up in Charleston, which one writer once said makes Byzantium look simple. But I couldn't do it in a computer. I don't have the time to invest in that much effort on the computer simply to keep track of it.

There are a lot of layers—everything is an onion. And we're talking almost a four-dimensional onion here. Any particular point that you look at—almost any particular point—has layers to it. It's one of the interesting things to me, is how much can I layer things without making it too complicated. It's quite possible for somebody to read these books as pure adventure, and I actually have twelve-year-old fans who do that. I was surprised to find that I had twelve-year-old fans, but I do and they read it just like that. Other people spend quite a lot of time discussing the layering, and it's fun for me to do.

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My impressions of the experience were that Mr. and Mrs. Rigney were quite normal people (imagine that!), perhaps bordering slightly on the eccentric. Harriet seemed to have a slight British or New England accent, and you certainly could not tell that the couple must be remarkably wealthy. In addition to his wife, Jordan had a tall blond-haired woman traveling with him, who took photos for the fans, prepared the novels for signing, and was quick to assist Mr. Jordan with any need. [Editor's Note: Her name was Dolores and she was very helpful and kind with everyone in line. She is not from Tor Books but I believe is one of RJ's assistants] All in all, I had a great time speaking with other fans and listening to our revered author speak. Upon departure, I realized that not once that evening was the ubiquitous "RAFO" mentioned by Robert Jordan.

On a separate note—great thanks to Jason Denzel and the staff at Dragonmount.com for the long hours and excellent website. Keep up the good work!

Harriet McDougal Rigney

Robert Jordan

Harriet McDougal Rigney

Glas Durboraw

Glas Durboraw

I had a rough outline of a little over 3,000 years of history before I started writing the Wheel of Time books, enough to make me feel like it was a real world where I could drop in casual mentions of historical events. Where I come from, if you want to say something was a long time ago you say it was 'Before Second Manassas'—it's a historical tag that everyone in Charleston understands. I wanted to be able to do that sort of thing with history in the world of The Wheel of Time.

The history began as a rough sketch with major points inked in. As I went along, I would sometimes look at the chart and say, "If this happened here and this happened there, something like this would probably happen here." It begins to create a real pattern of history. The readers picked up on it, realizing that there's more to the world than just what's happening in the story. The first time I got a letter asking about something like that, I thought, "God, this guy must be a fruitloop! He's talking about this as if it were real." But then it hit me. "Wait a minute, idiot. This is what you want them to feel, isn't it?" So I answered his question. A few times I've had to be fast on my feet, because I hadn't figured out something in the history that was very minor.

DragonCon has a track that follows my books, and one of the things they asked me to do was hand out the prizes at the trivia contest. In the final round these two women were up there answering questions I probably couldn't have answered without my notes. But they were just popping out the answers, ding ding ding. I never expected this incredible depth of study.

Moshe starts off the panel asking Tom to talk about how The Wheel of Time got started. Tom says that the story begins with Harriet. Tom was publisher of the Tempo imprint for Grosset & Dunlap back in the ’70s, and Harriet was his top editor. They did so well with Tempo that Grosset & Dunlap went out and bought SF publisher Ace for them to run. Their success continued at Ace, and Tom brought in an editor named Jim Baen to work under Harriet. Sales volume doubled.

Soon after this, though, Harriet’s parents died and she inherited the family house in downtown Charleston—with a 500-square-foot walled garden, a gardener, a maid, and a cook who had been with the family for years. “Harriet is a Southern Princess,” Tom says. Harriet was divorced and wanted to go home to Charleston to raise her son. Tom didn’t want to lose her as an editor, so Popham Press was created. Harriet acquired and edited books down in Charleston, and production and marketing were done by Ace under a profit-sharing agreement. “It was telecommuting before the word was invented,” Tom says.

Harriet met Jim Rigney in a local bookstore there in Charleston. Jim was an engineer in atomic submarines who had been injured, and while he was recuperating, he was writing. The bookstore owner knew Harriet was an editor, and he thought the two of them should meet, so he introduced them.

Jim wrote a book called The Fallon Blood to romanticize a part of U.S. history he felt had been overlooked in popular culture—the Southern role in the Revolutionary War (Swamp Fox, etc.). He decided that he would publish his books under pseudonyms, and use a different one for each series. He used the name Reagan O’Neal for the Fallon books.

Then Grosset & Dunlap started having problems and they brought in a “financial guy” to run the company. He decided that they should only publish bestsellers. This is part of the reason Tom left to found Tor Books. The opportunity came up for Tor to publish some Conan novels, one of which would be a novelization of the Conan the Destroyer movie. Jim Rigney was interested in doing the book and some other Conan novels, and the pseudonym he picked for them was Robert Jordan. He also took over editing some sword & sorcery books for Tor.

Friday was a beautiful day in the Two Rivers. There was a gentle breeze blowing inland and the sky was crystal. Perfect. Unlike the services a year ago, the laying of the ledger stone on Jim's grave was a quiet family affair. So, with apologies, I won't share the details. Jim's resting place is identified with a marker that will last for a few hundred years. I found myself thinking that his work will outlive even the marble on his grave. The stone is simple in form. It is etched with a few words which perfectly describe the gentle giant of a man that he was.....

James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

Born October 17, 1948
Died September 16, 2007

Father Story Teller
Soldier Singer

Finally, progress on Towers of Midnight is continuing at a fair pace. As always, there are sections that turn out beautifully and sections that don't. (The latter get thrown away and rewritten, the former get kept and rewritten. That's just how this goes.) I'm feeling very good about my deadlines on this one. It's going to be tight, but I think you'll get it next year as planned.

One of the things I felt could be improved on from The Gathering Storm is my use of names. Robert Jordan had a distinctive way of using names, and I think that some of my names for the book didn't quite hit the right mark. We're talking about very minor things—people who are named and don't appear, or maybe who speak one line or another. Anyone more major than that generally had a name already (or if they didn't, I pulled a name from one of Mr. Jordan's unused names files).

The thing is, a good epic fantasy like this uses dozens and dozens of new names in a book. I wanted to take a stab at approaching the naming in the way Mr. Jordan did. During my very first ride with Harriet, coming back from the airport two years ago to her home in Charleston, I remember her talking about some of Mr. Jordan's names. One came from a street we passed, another from a person he knew, and another from a word he saw on a sign. His goal was to hint at our world far in the future—or perhaps far in the past—by giving occasional hints to our world through legend, story, song, and name. Hence we get names like Thom or Artur, which are direct adaptations of names from our world.

Therefore, for Towers of Midnight I've been using a list of names from our world as inspiration. I chose the list of donors for the charity event that TarValon.net did last spring, and I've been posting the names on Twitter and Facebook as I choose them. So if you're curious about this, you can watch and see who gets chosen. I'm certain someone out there is keeping a list of them all as well. (I've got one here, and may post it eventually.)

I don't want to make it seem like I'm playing favorites or soliciting praise in order to get people into the Wheel of Time, and so for now I'm using this list ONLY. If we decide to do another charity event, I'll let you know. If you don't want to find out about the names, I won't post them here on the blog, but those who do wish to know can follow along. Remember, these are very small characters, often just mentioned by name but not seen. I'm adapting all the names, so the name I post is not what will appear in the book—it's just the inspiration for what will appear.

Still, I think it will make some people very happy and will allow me to try a method that Robert Jordan used in making these books. Perhaps it wasn't so conscious for him as it is for me, but one of my duties in writing these novels is to try—to the best of my abilities—to maintain the proper feel of the Wheel of Time. I think this will help. We'll see; I've got Harriet and Team Jordan backing me up, and so if any of the names stand out to them, they'll vanish and get replaced with something more appropriate.

(And, as I've said before, remember that the Wheel of Time turns, and people are constantly spun in and out of the Pattern. Those who are alive today could very well live again during the Third Age, and so it's not so odd at all for people who loved these books during our time to get pulled into Rand's ta'veren web and spun out again during the events of the Last Battle. . . .)

September 22,1989

{talking about Hurricane Hugo}...crashing into land...at Charlotte, South Carolina. That was a secondary target; I know an editor at TOR BOOKS who lives there, Harriet McDougal, former senior editor. Her husband is Robert Jordan, author of several Tarzan novels, but don't judge him by that; he's about to get into major fantasy, and will be one of the leading figures in the genre. I know. {...} I read his first huge fantasy epic in manuscript; it hasn't been published yet. {continues on how Harriet helped him publish a book}

MICHAEL MACCHIONE

Tarzan—Conan: What's the difference? They are both big muscular men who run around in loincloths.

JUDY GHIRARDELLI

ARRGG. I hope this is a mistype by you MPS, and that this was not really printed in a book. Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston, SC, then tracked inland and hit Charlotte, NC. I know—I was living in Charlotte, NC, and the chimney on the apartment above us blew over, collapsing the apartment above us at 5:30 in the morning. That was Friday; they told us to get out on Monday after inspecting. We moved Tuesday. The true eye of the world went over us too...

Anyhow, when living in Charlotte, much was made about the "ch" effect—people not being able to distinguish Charlotte from Charleston, and Charleston, SC from the same name in West Virginia, so I am a little sensitive. That is why I hope that the Charlotte, SC reference was your mistake Mike, and not Piers Anthony's. I can excuse you, since you live in Delaware, but I would hope that something like a book would get it right.

Sorry to be venting...

MICHAEL MACCHIONE

I just ran to get the book and I'm sorry, but it was Piers Anthony's error. (This is in the same chapter as the Tarzan reference.) Remember, these letters were written freehand and were not proofread, as most books would be. They copied these letters into the book, and edited for style not content.

Another question followed about the number of books. Same answer.

He said that he writes about 8 hours a day 6 days a week when he is not on tour. He said something about when he was fishing, unless he was fly-fishing or was on the boat really having to work at it, he felt like he should be home writing.

He then answered a question about living in Charleston; about how it was his favorite place to live out of the half dozen or so cities he felt that he would like to live in.

He said that for this book it took two months from the time he handed in the final manuscript until he went on tour.

Thank you! I'm also glad for the chance to visit your beautiful city. I’ve been to not a few places, but this is my first time in Russia. Many thanks to the organizers of the Wanderer Fantasy Convention who invited me to St. Petersburg. And my special thanks to them for the opportunity to visit Peterhof and admire its magnificent fountains. Fountains have fascinated me since childhood ...

Tahir Velimeev

What is the proper way to address you?—Mr. Robert Jordan? Or Mr. James Rigney ... Or in some other way?

Robert Jordan

Call me, as we do it in America, just James.

Tahir Velimeev

Or Robert? ...

Robert Jordan

Robert is fine too. I'm used to it. I’m often addressed exactly so in meetings with readers.

Tahir Velimeev

By the way, how many names does the multifaceted James Oliver Rigney, Jr. have?

Robert Jordan

Not very many, but also not a few. Under the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal the historical novels The Fallon Blood, The Fallon Legacy and The Fallon Pride were published. The events in them takes place during the American Revolution, around my hometown of Charleston. The name Jackson O'Reilly is on the cover of the western Cheyenne Raiders. My critical pieces on theater and dance I signed Chang Lung. And under the pseudonym Robert Jordan the novels of the Conan series and the The Wheel of Time series were published.

I was born in 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live now, in a house built in 1797. My home town is famous because of the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor during the Civil War between the North and South. My brother, older than me by twelve years, instilled in me an appreciation for books . And when our parents left him to the nanny, he read to me, not children’s books, but those that interested him—Mark Twain, HG Wells, Jules Verne. Along with Twain, my favorite writers became Louis Lamour, Charles Dickens, John W. McDonald. In the years 1968-1970, I served in the Army.

Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like to grow up in Charleston?

Photo by Jim Rigney

Yeah, it was hot! I had relatives all over the place, so there was a wonderful sense of extended family. There were many notions about what girls should and shouldn't do—that was not so hot—but that was very ingrained. I was a late-born child—my mother was forty-two when I was born—so her attitudes were those of an earlier generation. And mostly, I got along...it was a happy childhood.

Matt Hatch

What was it that girls could and couldn't do? What comes to mind when you think about that?

Harriet McDougal

Well, it was more...I was raised to "marry well", meaning money. And actually not money nearly so much as land, and proper blue blood, which in this case meant Confederate...and not much idea at all of a woman making independent money, unless it was as an artist or a writer. But there were no jobs; you could be a secretary. Wonderful. But that was not what I was raised to do.

Matt Hatch

You said you had family, so siblings? How many siblings?

Harriet McDougal

I had one sibling, a full sister who was twenty years older than me, and she was the only one.

Matt Hatch

And she's since passed away?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, she has gone. And she was very good to me.

Matt Hatch

Yeah? What's your favorite memory of her?

Harriet McDougal

Oh gosh, a lot. I loved her Christmas presents. She lived in Chattanooga, not in Charleston; she married when I was three. She was just a nice, younger woman in my life, and with my mother being that much older, she was a friend.

Matt Hatch

So did you have any nieces and nephews through her?

Harriet McDougal

Yes, a niece and a nephew.

Matt Hatch

And they are still...

Harriet McDougal

No, the nephew's dead, and the niece lives outside of Charleston. She has two sons.

So you still have family [in Charleston]?

Yeah, and I've got cousins you wouldn't believe.

Matt Hatch

From the quantity of cousins?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, yeah...and very nice. I love them.

Matt Hatch

A lot still live in Charleston?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah.

Matt Hatch

Do you have family events?

Harriet McDougal

Well we see them at Thanksgiving, Christmas—funerals these days—and also a lot of them, one main group are members of a very peculiar and politically not very correct—actually, it's getting more correct all the time—organization called the Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals, which is gaining considerably more attention as a very legitimate preservation society of a very important folk song ethic, and I love to sing the things.

Matt Hatch

Oh really?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, and there are now what are called rehearsals, and they used to have a once-a-year concert which was so peculiar. People dressed up like Miss Ann and Mr. Charlie, you know, in ball dresses, and we'd sit on the stage pretending to sing like African Americans, but not blackface—I don't mean that—but doing a thing called "shouting and lining", which is a traditional way of singing, and the whole point of the one concert was to raise money to buy the booze and the potato chips for the rehearsals throughout the year, which were once-a-month sing-alongs at people's houses, and when I was a little girl I'd hear these voices coming up the staircase. I loved the music from then on.

Matt Hatch

So music was always a part of your life?

Harriet McDougal

In that way—singing.

Matt Hatch

And do you still sing?

Harriet McDougal

Only in the back of the Spiritual Society. I sing in church on Sunday. It's not anything people would ever really, really want to listen to, but I love to do it.

Matt Hatch

I grew up in a very...my parents were singers, so I grew up around...

Harriet McDougal

Oh, so they were good?

Matt Hatch

(laughs) They were very good. Well I mean, you can imagine...we had those kinds of moments where everyone...you'd hear that. I mean, you'd hear singing all the time, and they wanted us to sing; singing was very much a part of my upbringing.

Now, did you grow up in the house where you live now?

The carriage house

Yes. I began...my first memories are of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My father had been stationed at Pearl Harbor when the attack came, but he was on a troop transport going one way or another from Pearl; I don't know which way he was headed. He was then stationed at the University of North Carolina running a huge NROTC program. Two years later, he was ordered to the Pacific, and mother brought me back to Charleston; she had bought the house that I now live in—as we say, she had "bought it in" from her sister and brothers when her mother died the year I was born, and Daddy was fortunately at sea, because she took out a mortgage, and if he had been on land, he'd have killed her. He had a horror of debt, and would never have agreed to that, but she just trotted over to the bank and did it. And so we came back—the house was rented, and we lived in the carriage house, which was Jim's office much later. And then when the tenant—I've forgotten what he did; he left Charleston, or he died, or whatever—we then moved—oh, Daddy came home, is what happened—and we moved up to the Navy Yard, which was a huge...it had had forty thousand employees during the World War. He was made acting Commandant of the Navy Yard, and we lived out there for a while.

Matt Hatch

And you held on to the home land, or rented it out?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, and he was acting Commandant—they didn't make him full Commandant; he had thirty-seven years in, and they knew he wanted to retire in Charleston because of mother's enormous family being there—so we moved all the way ten miles down the road. And I never had the Navy experience of bopping from school to school, and all that stuff.

Matt Hatch

How long were you out of the house then, before you moved back in?

Harriet McDougal

I don't remember. Maybe a year, maybe two years.

Matt Hatch

So it was your mother that owned that; she was the one that went and bought it, and then obviously when your father came back, he was okay with this?

Harriet McDougal

Oh yeah, yeah. And he knew he wanted to retire in Charleston.

Can you tell us a little bit more about your mother? What she did, how she influenced you?

Louisa McCord Popham

Yeah. She was a beauty, and she sang and whistled, sort of like the Irish song about the Whistling Gypsy. She was quite an irresistible character; tremendous charm. She was a wonderful cook and hostess. She wasn't much on intimate warmth, but she was great really, in every way. She sewed. They never had a whole lot of money. We had a grand house at the Navy Yard, and I remember going with her—I was getting on, like, five at this point—to Woolworth's to buy great lengths of some horrible rayon for her to make curtains for the huge windows. But as somebody said to me later who came to visit, he said, "I bet when your father married her, his career took off like a rocket!" And I think it did! That was of course so many years before I was born. But she was a charmer and a half—just darling.

Matt Hatch

How old were they when they got married?

Harriet McDougal

Daddy was in I guess his mid-twenties, and she was eighteen.

Matt Hatch

In what way do you think she influenced you the most?

Harriet McDougal

Well, I don't know; I've never really thought about it. I know that I never really thought I was pretty—not next to her. And she also had a very...she had a great way of turning her hand to what needed to be done. There was no stuff about,"Oh, I don't know how to do this." She would pick up a hammer—do a poor job of hammering in the nails, but she'd do it. And also, a sense of "Housekeeping is really important as a form of stage management." She said—somebody said—"Weeza!"—her name was Louisa but she was called "Weeza", or "Gay", in the earlier sense, and apparently—I've been told that came about in her childhood because she was said to look like some politician of the day named John Gary Evans. It was not about her gaiety, but that was really inborn. And on her tombstone, my sister and I chose "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine," and she had one. So I've forgotten what you asked me.

Teri Hatch

That's beautiful.

Matt Hatch

No, the influence...what you said, that she would just pick up a hammer...

Harriet McDougal

Yeah! She sewed all the time; she did cross-stitch. I have some table mats she made for me, which she did for brides—she made them a set of linen table mats with their initials stamped inside—and also camisoles, which people used to wear.

Matt Hatch

Sounds like she was very productive.

Harriet McDougal

Yes, she believed in that.

How do you think Jim's experience of childhood in Charleston compared to your own?

Well, Jim grew up real poor, and we were not, and I didn't...I mean I grew up in the house I live in now, which is in the best part of town—BIG—I've forgotten whether you were there for the (TarValon.net anniversary visit to Charleston)—

Matt Hatch

I...I haven't. I am coming!

Harriet McDougal

Well anyway, and it was...mother did a lot of yardwork, but she was a snob about food. My best friend lived down the street, and in that house, there was post-WWII margarine, which the dairy people, they controlled it, and it was white stuff in a bag with a yellow pill, and you'd have to mash it through the plastic to make it go yellow, you remember that horrible stuff?

Matt Hatch

Interesting...

Teri Hatch

I remember hearing about it.

Harriet McDougal

Oh, it was...yeah, awful. Mother wouldn't have it in the house, and the only bread she would have in the house was Pepperidge Farm. She really ate and cooked and all of that, and Wilson was saying the other day, he remembered sitting at Jim's mother's table, and supper was mayonnaise sandwiches.

Matt Hatch

(laughs) I loved mayonnaise sandwiches.

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, but mother didn't do that. I lived, really, a live of privilege as a child. Jim's life was not. His father came back from the War, and when they married, his father got a job on the police force, and also painted houses on the weekend to make extra money, so it was pretty hard scrabble. And they then built a house with their own hands outside of town, and unfortunately put chlordane down in the cellar, in the foundation to kill bugs—nobody said it was not such a good thing to do—so it's possible Mr. Rigney's health problems might have had something to do with that. But I think Jim had a happy childhood.

Matt Hatch

Did your mother know Jim?

Harriet McDougal

No; neither of my parents ever met him.

How about your days at school? Were you involved in clubs, organizations...?

Yes. In high school I was just determined. My parents were talking about sending me off to boarding school, and I thought, well, if you sent me to Putney, I would love that; Putney was the hippie school of the time—and you could go on an experiment of international living, and they had a greased pig race—but they were talking about sending me to St. Timothy's in Virginia, where I knew they would make me wear white gloves, and I wasn't going to go, and I thought, "Well,"—communication was not really a big thing—"I will be so successful at Ashley Hall that they won't send me away," so I did; I joined everything, and was president of everything I could get my hands on, all because I'd figured out home was better. And so I did; I was really a nasty little overachiever in high school, president of the student body—it was a girls' school—French Club, Latin Club. I didn't take part in synchronized swimming, which a friend of mine did; sports were not my thing. I wore the glasses, mostly—besides, you can't play basketball and read at the same time. (laughter) Anything that involved reading was my cup of tea. I think there was a drama club...I don't know.

Matt Hatch

You were everywhere.

Harriet McDougal

Yeah. Anything. See, "Well you can't; I really can't go away; I'm so busy!" It worked!

Matt Hatch

Was it your mother or father that really wanted you to go away? Was it both of them?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, kind of. I think they thought they were doing a nice thing. And in those days, girls' boarding schools still existed, and I think they must have grown up because they were thought to be better than anything that could be gotten locally, wherever you were locally.

What was it like to be a female student at Harvard in the age of Harvard-Radcliffe?

That's an interesting question. I thought, "Oh, I dunno, it just was." When you're doing it, in your own experience, it's just sort of there. It was indeed second-class citizenship, but I was very lucky to be there, all at the same time.

Matt Hatch

Did you sense that?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah, both! "Boy, I'm glad to be there", and, "Boy they look down their noses at me." And the president of Radcliffe spoke to the freshman class that I later joined—I transferred in; I went as a sophomore, but I've heard about this—but he said, "Well, we know that the men are here to get bachelor's degrees, but you are here to get the MRS. Let the men...let your husband buy the house for you, and you raise the children."

Matt Hatch

What was the general response from women?

Harriet McDougal

I don't know. That was what he said to the incoming freshmen of Radcliffe; I was not present that day. Actually, the experience of my mother's family after the Civil War was kind of useful, because so many men had been killed, but the women really had to root hog or die. And it was...I think it's why mother picked up a hammer. Nobody's going to do it for you; do it.

Matt Hatch

Did you feel like you were a part of that change, to a place like Harvard-Radcliffe?

Harriet McDougal

No. I was just there.

Matt Hatch

How did you feel about opportunities for women? Did you feel like there were going to be more at the time?

Harriet McDougal

No. It was just—"hmm!" There were no opportunities. When I got home from college, I spent a year at home, getting engaged and unengaged, behaving generally badly. I had a job, and it paid me $42.50 a week. I was assistant archivist at the South Carolina Historical Society. My Uncle Sam, who I loved dearly, shoehorned me into this. There were two employees—the archivist, and the assistant archivist—and we cut the paper, to make a carbon copy, in half for short letters, because that was thriftier—position it behind the carbon copy, type very carefully—and the archivist was a woman. I thought partly because I could see that the job opportunities for me in Charleston were essentially nil, and also because I was behaving badly, and I saw no sign of stopping this, that I had better go to New York to find work, and my bad behavior would be less noticeable. I mean, I had three engagements that year; this is not what was expected behavior. So I did go to New York. Some guy I met at work, actually, said he would give me a letter to the head of copyeditors at at John Wiley & Sons, and I ended up going to work there.

How long did you work at John Wiley & Sons?

Seven...seven lean years! It's funny the way the...to come back.

Matt Hatch

When exactly did you graduate?

Harriet McDougal

'60, 1960.

Matt Hatch

And when did you marry?

Harriet McDougal

'64.

Matt Hatch

And your first husband was...?

Harriet McDougal

Ed McDougal, and I married him in 1964. And Will, my son, was born in 1968, and I left Ed in 1970, at which point the women's movement had begun to take on steam.

Matt Hatch

And you met him in New York?

Harriet McDougal

Yeah.

Matt Hatch

Was he also in the same industry?

Harriet McDougal

No. He worked at Equitable Life Insurance.

Matt Hatch

And after 1970, when is it that you met Jim?

Harriet McDougal

I think I met him in '78? Yeah. I moved back to Charleston in '77, so...'78, '79, something like that.

Matt Hatch

So in that break between '70 and '78, were you still in New York at that time? You said you had seven lean years; where were you working during that period of time?

Harriet McDougal

Then I moved into trade publishing, which was a lot more fun. I started at Harcourt Brace, where I worked on the first textbook of science fiction ever published. We had a wonderful big editor named Mr. Pullen, and it was his project, and I said, "Can I work on it? Please, please?" And I did; it was fun. And from there, I went to World Publishing, and I've forgotten what they hired me to do...oh, run the copyeditors. And then it was...having one paroxysm after another. And they put me in charge of children's books, having fired a very distinguished children's book department, and it was nuts, which is of course a wonderful learning opportunity. And from there, I went freelance for a while, living in downtown Brooklyn, and realizing Will was, actually, turning four—I didn't have any health insurance, and neither did he, and maybe it was time to stop doing freelance and get a corporate job. And somebody had just left Grosset & Dunlap, and I said, "Well, who's replacing you?" and he said, "I can't even recommend that job to a friend, Harriet." I said, "Nevertheless..." and went and interviewed and got it, and that was where I met Tom Doherty, when I was hired as editor for Tempo Books. But then I began to get angry, because not long after I started working, the President of Grosset said in my presence, "Thank God we've got her instead of Dummy _____!" who was my friend I was replacing, and he had been making fifteen thousand a year, and I was making eleven. "Let me see if I can fight to get a raise to twelve," because I was paying six thousand for child care. Daycare just didn't exist back then. And I began to get pissed off.

Matt Hatch

What did you do?

Harriet McDougal

I put my head down and worked. (laughter) And began to think about how I could get out, and it finally came...what did happen? It was a big mess of family stuff and all, but I could move back to Charleston if I could figure out how to make a buck, and I'd met a guy named Richard Gallen who had been general counsel at Dell, and he had figured out how to tax shelter books, and needed books to tax shelter—there's nothing crooked about this—so he said, "You find the books; I'll give you the money to pay the advance, and see if we can't make money together," and I said, "I'm sorry, I can't; my monthly nut's too high, and I have a child to support, and no help from Ed. None, nada." But the chance to live in the house in Charleston...my sister's child—you don't want to know; it was a real can of bait—and I called Dick and said, "Is your offer still good?" And he said, "Yeah, I'll meet you for lunch tomorrow, and bring a contract." And he did; it was double-spaced, one page. I signed it, and armed with that—and I think I had two thousand dollars in the bank—off Will and I went to Charleston! So it was a pretty wild adventure, but it worked. It had some real poor moments, I'll tell you that.

Robert Jordan scores big with his tenth Wheel Of Time novel—but is he really Tolkien's heir?

Robert Jordan has lived his whole life in Charleston, as did his forefathers. It is his home, and he is very attached to it. He and his wife (and editor) Harriet have considered a host of other cities, many with brighter lights than our own, but they always come back to Jordan's roots.

"There are bits and pieces (of Charleston) here and there, though I continue to stress that the Two Rivers (home of the series' three main protagonists) has no relation between the Ashley and the Cooper, but of course things filter through. It's impossible to write without keeping who you are and where you're from out of it," says Jordan.

"History is mutable. It's so dependent on who you remember and what you remember. For instance, with the American Revolution, Charleston was written out of the history books because of the secession. You know, during the Boston Tea Party, we sent more food and aid to Boston than any of its neighboring colonies. But that's not something that children read about in school. The solid tones of the past are not that solid. They are a thin facade placed by partisan observers," he says.

Another thing that sets Jordan apart from Tolkien is an ever-present sense of hope—something that has kept readers reading for 7,000 pages and will keep them reading 'til the end of the series, which Jordan says will take a minimum of two more books. No matter how bad the odds are against his characters, no matter that the world draws ever closer to its final battle with the Dark One, Jordan slips in enough events to stop readers from becoming fatalistic.

Tolkien, on the other hand, was a profound fatalist himself. And, indeed, while his characters did, for the most part, achieve their ends, there is a sense of bittersweetness that pervades his works. His attitude is evident even in his relationships with the young children he left at home while off fighting World War II (and dreaming up his master work). Speaking metaphorically of the war with the Germans, he wrote his youngest son Christopher, saying, "We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. ... The War is not over (and the one that is or the part of it, has largely been lost.) But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint."

It would be hard to picture Jordan announcing that wars are always lost to a young child; instead, he has a childlike sense of wonder and enjoyment of the world around him that his predecessor lacked.

Halo6819 (August 2012)

Harriet drove me by here on one of my visits. Pointed at the sign and waited for me to get it.

Growing up, he'd often told about lining up I think Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Jack London, and thinking, "I want to write books."

Jason Denzel

He joined the Army in 1968 and served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner.

Harriet McDougal

He returned to begin college at The Citadel as a veteran student and took a job as a civilian nuclear engineer working for the United States Navy.

Jason Denzel

And it was during this time that he took a hard look at his life and decided to become a full-time writer.

Harriet McDougal

He was in the hospital with a blood clot when he did the famous—the thing so many people talk about doing—he threw a book across the room and said, "I can do better than that." He wrote something called Warriors of the Altaii. I read it, and...no, it wasn't what I was interested in. But it showed he could do it. So I gave him a contract for a book that became The Fallon Blood. We'd been seeing a lot of each other. He brought a tiger claw from Vietnam to show my son. Will came running upstairs to my office one day and said, "Mom, he'll take me to see the Star Trek movie." And I said, "Can I come too?" And he said yes. And I guess that was our first date.

Tom Doherty

She edited Jim, and they fell in love, and they got married, and we all became friends.

Brandon always tells the story about going to your house in Charleston for the first time, and you had some soup on the stove, which you offered to him. But he just wanted to read the ending. My question is: Did he ever eat the soup?

Brandon Sanderson

Marie Curie

Brandon Sanderson

The event started for me when the other Memory Keepers began to trickle in around 3:00 p.m. By 5:30, four of the seven had arrived. We were expecting Brandon, Harriet, and Maria at 6:00, but Harriet and Maria decided to arrive a bit earlier (at 5:30), which ended up being an incredible gift for us. When the Barnes & Noble CRM told us that Harriet had arrived, I felt my heart start beating a little faster, and I remembered what it was like to be genuinely nervous for the first time in quite a while. I was about to meet the woman that helped guide the creation of one of my favorite things in the world! We met her at the top of the stairs, and then escorted her and Maria to the room where we would get to hang out.

For the next hour and a half, that's what we did. We really just hung out. There was a little talk about the book, but not much, since most people hadn't finished reading yet. Harriet asked if any had finished, and when I said I had, she asked for my opinion. I gave it openly and honestly, telling her of my love for this book, as well as the entire series. I expressed my gratitude to her, Brandon, Maria, and of course forever to Robert Jordan, for what they brought to us. But most of the time, we just talked about life.

Brandon Sanderson

Jhirrad

Did Charleston have a lot of influence on the Ogier?

Maria Simons

Harriet McDougal

On my tour I've been stopping to sign books in airport bookstores as usual. Years ago some of my fans nicknamed this "Brandalizing." Grammar Girl did a quick blog post about the term this week.

Here's a video of Harriet reading the wind scene from A Memory of Light at our signing this past weekend at the College of Charleston. Thanks, Jessica Crout! The Addlestone Library there is the home of Robert Jordan's papers. They had on display this very early draft of The Eye of the World with Jordan's handwritten edits on it. (Sorry my photo is so blurry.)

Most of the questions during the Q&A centered on the writing process in one way or another, either of these last three Wheel of Time books or of his other works. I had never before had a grasp on the sheer size of what Mr. Jordan had thought about and committed to (digital) paper about this series, all the details that will probably never see the light of day, until Brandon commented that his attempt to put Jordan's massive document onto his own computer resulted in it crashing after 32,000 pages. If we ever need a metric to relate how real the world Jordan created was, that is as good as it gets.

Brandon also shared the funny and idiosyncratic way Mr. Jordan would get his inspiration for names; it wasn't all just Norse and Hindu myth all the time, but apparently also everyday objects—streets in his home town (Ogier Street!), his washing machine, and random strolls through the phone book. If you've lived in Charleston in the past 23 years, who knows, you may have made an appearance as an Andoran Noble or the Old Tongue name for an Aiel warrior society!

I was amazed by the language, geography, people, and so on in the books, and I always wondered what Robert Jordan's office looked like. I thought it must be covered with maps and things relating to the books. What was it like to walk in there?

What you saw first when you walked in was a plastic human skeleton. And it wears a Viking helmet. And then you saw the books. There was a bookcase filled with books on religions. There was another bookcase of Westerns. There was a very big printer, and a roll-top desk. But what there weren't were maps. They were all in his head.

Brandon Sanderson

There were a lot of weapons, though.

Harriet McDougal

There was a room full of edged weapons!

Tom and I were just discussing yesterday that we were doing "telecommuting" before it was even a term.

Tom Doherty

She was the first one.

Harriet McDougal

I had already moved back to Charleston when he was starting Tor. He asked me if I would be the editorial director. He said: "I'm not asking you to move back, I'm just asking you to edit." And I said okay.

Tom Doherty

She's the best editor I've ever worked with.

Harriet McDougal

Oh, thank you.

Tom Doherty

You know, I've worked with a lot of them, as Publisher, as Vice President of Sales at Simon and Schuster, at Grosset and Dunlap. Harriet's the best. I just couldn't do without her and, you know, just because she was in Charleston wasn't going to stop us from working together.

Harriet McDougal

Well, thank you, Tom. A week ago in Provo [at the first A Memory of Light signing event on January 8th, 2013] I walked into the high school auditorium where everybody was gathered for a pre‑event, before the book went on sale at Midnight. [Dragonmount.com Founder] Jason Denzel introduced me in lavish terms, using words like "wonderful". The crowd, which was wall‑to‑wall, gave me a standing ovation and moved me almost to the point of tears. They just weren't stopping. I began speaking over them and said: "Thank you very much. Thank you for the lovely introduction, Jason, but I don't think all those words are true. I'm here to tell you I put on my shoes one foot at a time, just the way you do." I actually got them to sit down.

The first Robert Jordan novel Harriet published personally, we did as a joint venture under the imprint and the company Popham Press. Popham is her maiden name.

Harriet McDougal

Well, it was distributed by Ace.

Tom Doherty

It was distributed by it, yes. I was Publisher of Ace at the time.

Irene Gallo

What was the title of that book?

Harriet McDougal

His first published book is called The Fallon Blood. It's a novel that covers the American Revolution in the South. At the time, I thought: "If I have to look at one more book about the Civil War, I'll just throw up. I've had it with crinoline. There are too many. Margaret Mitchell did it once and for all. Let's go for the Revolution instead." So he did—the revolution in Charleston, South Carolina, in particular.

He followed that with The Fallon Pride, which covered the War of 1812, and The Fallon Legacy, which took the Fallons into the brand new Republic of Texas. At that point distribution dried up, otherwise he could have just gone on. He had a dream in which a man is holding Michael Fallon's sword, standing next to the grave of the Fallon who has died in the Vietnam conflict, and I thought, oh, boy. Anyway, with those books he wanted to write the Southern sweep of American history, in the way that John Jakes wrote the Northern sweep. Taking people across the continent. And they were good.

Tom Doherty

They were.

Harriet McDougal

I would like to the point out something to the fans. Every single book Robert Jordan wrote begins with the wind. "The English wind blew the dust into Michael Fallon's face on his Irish road." That was the beginning of The Fallon Blood. The Fallon Pride begins, "The August winds scorched across Tripoli harbor." There is always a wind. I think it was very conscious that he was breathing life into his characters. Breath and wind have the same root, I think, at least in Hebrew.

Irene Gallo

That's wonderful.

And I . . . I tell this story a lot, but it's a fun story. I flew in. Harriet herself picked me up at the airport. I had been really nervous to meet Harriet—like, you know, really nervous. I knew Harriet . . . like, she was one of the big editors in the field, and authors have this kind of—even, you know, published authors—are sometimes kind of scared of editors, right? And Harriet . . . I don't know if you guys know . . . I mean, she edited Ender's Game, okay? She edited—and discovered—Robert Jordan, and she's behind the two biggest books in fantasy and science fiction of the last 30 years—Ender's Game and Eye of the World. So I was really nervous.

And so I'm like . . . and then I meet her, and as you can tell, she's like this wonderful, just so nice, awesome person. It was such a relief. I'm like, oh good. I actually called Emily that night and I'm like, ahh, I didn't need to be worried. Like, take your favorite grandmother and mix her with a southern gentlewoman and you have Harriet.

Harriet McDougal

I've hidden the whips.

[laughter]

Brandon Sanderson

And she drove me to the house there in Charleston, which is this wonderful house, built in the 1700s, right?

Harriet McDougal

Barely. 1798.

Brandon Sanderson

And we walk in the door, and Harriet had been cooking dinner, and it was a bean soup. I still remember all these things where she said, well I put some soup on, and I can warm it up, and would you like to have some food? And I said, I would like the ending, please.

[laughter] [applause]

Because I didn't know . . . You know, I just signed the contracts without knowing. You know, you guys work for Microsoft, NDA stuff, you got to say yes first, and then you get the NDA, and then you get to be a part of it.

And so, I knew that there was an ending, because Robert Jordan had talked about writing the ending. I knew, and Harriet had confirmed, the ending had been written. And so I walked in, and it was like ten o'clock at night. But I got that ending, and I sat down in the front room—sitting room—and I read what you now have as primarily the epilogue of A Memory of Light. Almost all the epilogue was in there.

Also contained in there were several big important scenes from the prologue, which we split among the three prologues. There were a couple of the really cool scenes in there. There was the Tower of Ghenjei. There was a place where Egwene gets a special visitor, and—I think it's called A Cup of Tea—that scene, but really it was the ending that I wanted to read.

Harriet McDougal

And there's the blank in the blank.

Brandon Sanderson

There's the blank in the blank, yes, which is in the prologue of A Memory of Light—one of the prologue sequences. And I read all of this and read his ending, which you now have in your hands.

And Harriet afterwards—she said, well what do you think? And I said, it was satisfying. That was my word for it. It was the right ending. I felt a huge sense of relief. In a lot of ways, there wasn't a lot there. There were 200 pages, and so it wasn't huge. But at the same time, it was a huge relief to me, because the ending had been done, and it had been done right. And my job, then, was not so impossible, because all I had to do was get from well-written book to well-written ending without screwing it up too much.

And having that ending in hand is really what has made this possible, and made me able to work on these books in a way that I really feel conformed to Robert Jordan's vision for them, because I knew where he was going. And I tend to work from an ending—that's how I write my books, is I always have the ending in mind first. And so, that is the story of how you came to get A Memory of Light. And it has been an awesome and daunting and horrifying and extremely hard and wonderful experience all in one.

The Notes

As I've said before, I signed the contracts with Harriet to finish this series before I was given the notes. Therefore, going into this, I knew very little of what had been done for A Memory of Light already. In fact, the only thing I did know was that Mr. Jordan had written down the ending—the one he'd been promising for years that he had in his head. (Though, being the gardener-type writer that he was, he always noted that the ending could change shape as his view of it evolved over time.)

Eager, daunted, I flew to Charleston in December 2007 to meet Harriet. I knew her by reputation only—the editorial director of Tor Books during its foundational years, the woman who edited Ender's Game and who discovered Robert Jordan. I was rather intimidated. Turns out, Harriet is quite grandmotherly—in a southern gentlewoman sort of way. She's confident, capable, and has this air of knowledge about her. However, she's also kind, quick with a smile, and remarkably genuine. I don't know that I've ever met someone who so effortlessly blends self-confidence with compassion.

Once I arrived at Harriet's house, I asked for the ending, which she gave me. I spent hours picking through the notes and reading—I was at it after Harriet retired for the night, though before she left, she pointed to the computer in the front room where I was sitting. "That's Robert Jordan's," she noted to me. "That's where he wrote many of the books, on that computer, that keyboard. We recently moved it in from the office into this room."