Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Brandon Sanderson on UNFETTERED (Verbatim)

Hi all, this is Brandon Sanderson, fresh off of finishing the last book of The Wheel of Time, A Memory of Light, and I'm here to introduce the story collection Unfettered to you. Shawn Speakman is putting together—actually asked all of us to do something like this, to talk about how we got involved in the project—he first approached me when I was on tour—it was probably I guess for Alloy of Law—and he explained that he was having...he had a lot of medical bills—Shawn has had some health troubles lately—and he's a good friend of a lot of us in the community, and he was looking to put together an anthology to maybe help to defray some of these costs, at the suggestion of Terry Brooks. And he just asked if I'd be interested; he said, "Really, it could be anything." That's why he's calling it "Unfettered", is because he didn't want to put any restrictions; in fact, he said it could be deleted scenes, it could be any sort of material relating to anything we wanted to do. He sounded most interested in something relating to one of my worlds that I've already written in, but he really said it could be anything.

Well, I wasn't sure I'd be able to be involved, because A Memory of Light has taken...it was taking quite a bit of my time. It's quite the big project, and finding any time at all to work on anything else was really difficult. At the same time, however, there's a sequence of viewpoints in A Memory of Light—and I'm not at liberty yet to say who it is, but it's a character that you will know—that I was working on that were somewhat more daring than some of the viewpoints I've done. I wanted to try and give some deeper backstory to someone, and at the end of the day, showing the scenes to Harriet, we all liked them, but they didn't fit in the book. Harriet felt that they were too distracting, because of the new, sort of...new things I was adding, the things I was fleshing out. This is something that sometimes you want to avoid in storytelling, where you're near the end of the climax, introducing new concepts to kind of distract and derail.

She felt that these scenes were doing that, and so after some discussion, we decided that they should be cut. And I always kind of felt sad, because while I agree that they were distracting, I really felt that they were strong and that they added a lot to the character, and give a lot of extra motivation—a lot of extra poignancy to some of the things going on in A Memory of Light—and so I began to think maybe this would be the place for them. I approached Harriet, and she said she thought that was a good idea.

So what we'll be doing, it's a story called "River of Souls" but it's actually a sequence of deleted scenes. They are a complete arc for a certain character; they are meant to be read companionly to A Memory of Light. It's not going to make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read at least the rest of the Wheel of Time, but I find them very exciting; I think you'll really like them, and I think this is a good place for them because they won't be distracting from the rest of the story.

So, "River of Souls" is going to be part of the Unfettered anthology which has lots of wonderful other people in it—in fact I'm honored to have a story in there, to be alongside some of the names that are in this anthology—and I really wish Shawn the best. He's been a wonderful help to me in my career, and to a lot of the writers out there, so I hope you guys enjoy reading Unfettered, and look forward to reading "River of Souls", and once A Memory of Light is out, I'll be able to talk a little bit more about this character, why these scenes were important, and what's going on there.

Footnote

Peter added a clarification to this on Dragonmount.

Peter Ahlstrom

It was actually Harriet's suggestion that this go in the anthology. When we talked to her about Unfettered around the time of JordanCon, we asked her about including a completely different and much shorter deleted scene. She said no to that but suggested this sequence instead.

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Brandon Sanderson's Blog: A MEMORY OF LIGHT deleted sequence "River of Souls" to appear in UNFETTERED anthology (Verbatim)

Shawn Speakman has put together a great anthology coming out in early 2013 that features a bunch of big names in the fantasy field (including Terry Brooks, Pat Rothfuss, Tad Williams, and others). He asked the authors to record videos to promote it, so here's my video explaining my contribution.

If you're interested, you can preorder Unfettered here. It will also be available for Kindle and Nook once the book is released.

A transcription of the video is available here.

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Twitter 2012 (WoT) (Verbatim)

I've been getting questions about "Unfettered," an anthology next year with a Wheel of Time story in it. Blog post next week, but...

Brandon Sanderson

The "story" is actually a deleted sequence from A Memory of Light we cut for pacing reasons. We donated it to Shawn to help pay his medical bills.

Brandon Sanderson

As I said, I will blog this soon. It is from the viewpoint of someone you know, but not one of the main characters.

Jonathan B.

Could you let us know where the "story" would have gone in the book once its released so we can read it in order?

Brandon Sanderson

Sure.

Brandon Sanderson

A deleted sequence from A Memory of Light called "River of Souls" will appear in the anthology Unfettered (early 2013). http://youtu.be/UtHQbOMiD-k

Transcript of video here.

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Twitter 2012 (WoT) (Verbatim)

Memory 24 is such a boring teaser and on @BrandSanderson's birthday too. This is not right! @tordotcom should give us a bonus memory.

Ha. Okay, Teaser: "River of Souls" was a direct result of me trying to do be better at something RJ did well & I did poorly.

Brandon Sanderson

Problem is, I overdid it, and the story veered far too "Brandon-ish" as a result, which was why we cut it.

Brandon Sanderson

Fortunately, by having done "River of Souls", the added depth behind-the-scenes helped fix the very issue I was worried about.

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AMOL Signing Report - Deslya (Paraphrased)

When you read the books, did you have an affinity for a character and as you wrote did you change?

When I read it was mostly Perrin. I'll admit I had a fondness for Mat later on, but it never became my supportive Perrin, even when he was down in the dumps. I didn't stop being a Perrin fan because he moped a little. He was my favorite all along. When it came time to write the books, Perrin remained my favorite. He was among my favorite viewpoints to write as well. I was very excited by the prospect of being able to do a lot of Perrin in Towers of Midnight, and having a lot of freedom with his sequences was a real pleasure. When I finished the rough draft of A Memory of Light, there was a lot of, like 20% more Perrin than Rand, so that didn't turn out right. It's really Rand's series, it needs more Rand, so when I sent it to Team Jordan, they said there was a lot of Perrin, so we upped the Rand count. There was a Perrin sequence that didn't really feel right for the book that was about 20,000 words, so we cut that out and added a Rand sequence that was about the same length which I had already been working on, and that helped restore the balance. When I started A Memory of Light I was fresh off Towers of Midnight and in a Perrin mindset, so I was like PERRIN IS AWESOME, did his stuff, then moved on to the other characters' arcs in succession.

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