by Nina Allan
Given all the problems in publishing, how do you feel about your kids following you in the business?
My three children all write children’s books. My son Adam also writes adult books. I wish they’d get real jobs. [Laughter] Yeah, they all do it, and they all do something else, too. My daughter, Heidi, is also my PA, she organizes me. My son Adam is a professional musician, a web designer, a poker player, and a novelist. And he is also a composer and writes lyrics. My son Jason is an award-winning photographer but he also writes, he does—he illustrates children’s books with his photographs, but he also is writing magazine articles and is about to write his first book, along with his brother, sister, and me, for National Geographic.
Would you say to all the aspiring writers out there that they should develop a sideline in a more respectable field, like poker playing?
[Laughs] Yes. Or have rich parents.
You recently became the first woman to ever give the Andrew Lang Lecture at St. Andrews University. Can you tell us about that?
Well, Andrew Lang was an amazing late nineteenth, early twentieth century writer. He had written essays, he had written short stories, he had written poetry, novels. He even worked on a novel with H. Rider Haggard, who was a friend of his, but what he’s most famous for, it turned out, was a series of twelve books that he actually didn’t write. Those were the Coloured Fairy Books: The Blue Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, etc. The not-so-hidden secret was that it was really his wife who had done most of the retelling of the stories or the translation, and so it’s a cadre of other women who did it. He simply edited it and because he was a very well-known folklorist, they used his name to front the books. And he had an attachment with St. Andrews and Scotland. He’d gone to university there, he had been, I think, a, like a trustee there for a while, and he lived there. He lived at St. Andrews in the wintertime, summered in London, which is a very bizarre way of doing it actually. London is vastly too hot in the summer, St. Andrews is vastly too cold in winter. And there’s a street named after him, he’s buried in St. Andrews, etc. And after his death in 1912 they started a lecture series in his name. Each person who gave the lecture had to lecture on something that Andrew Lang was interested in, and since he was interested in everything, you know, historical things, poetic things, literary things, folkloric things, it was very easy to get people to do the lecture. And the lectures have been going on since 1927, not every year—there’ve only been twenty-two lectures—but they’ve included people like John Buchan who wrote The 39 Steps, a lot of academics, and in 1939, a month after I was born, the lecture was given by an Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien. He talked on fairy stories. He gave a very famous essay on fairy stories that was, for me, one of the iconic pieces that I read when I was first getting interested in folklore, and lo and behold, last spring they asked me if I would give the next Andrew Lang Lecture, and I had just finished doing an introduction for The Folio Society’s elegant, expensive, illustrated version of The Olive Fairy Book, and I was thrilled. They brought me over to give a lecture, and I was told I was the first woman, since 1927, to give a lecture.
What do you make of that, being the first? Did you have any thoughts about that?
I had a lot of thoughts about that. Like, do you know who you missed? Isak Dinesen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Angela Carter, and, you know, on and on and on, who’ve died. You also did not ask A.S Byatt or Marina Warner or Maria Tatar or any of the … Katharine Briggs, who died, great women of British folklore. I mean, it’s astonishing to me who they didn’t ask. That they asked me was a great honor, but the honor was all to me. I’m not sure I brought any honor to them.
It seems especially bizarre that, over the course of ninety years, they never ended up having a woman—especially given the fact that, as you said, his wife actually is the one that had written the books that he’s most famous for.
I did point this out in my lecture. I did also offer them some names that they might think of having, including Terri Windling, and Katherine Langrish, and Elizabeth Wein, and people like that.
Do you imagine that there’s someone who was just born who will grow up reading your lecture the way you grew up reading Tolkien’s?
Well, one could devoutly hope so.
All right, so that pretty much does it for our questions. So, just to wrap things up, are there any other new or upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?
Let’s see. I’m hoping that I’ll do a third Foiled book, probably called En Garde!, but they have not signed up for it yet. A lot depends on how well the second book does. I’m working on a Hansel and Gretel as twins in the Holocaust, it’s called The House of Candy. My son Adam and I are working on a trilogy for upper middle grade kids called The Seelie Wars and the first book, The Hostage Prince, will be out this fall. I have a book called Trash Mountain, which is a talking animal novel for kids about the war between the red squirrels and the gray squirrels, which is pretty brutal, actually. The war, that is. The gray squirrels can outfight and can have more babies than the red squirrels. They also carry a virus that doesn’t affect them, but kills the red squirrels. This is true. This is all true. This is why the red squirrels are dying out. But what they don’t know, the actual red—uh, gray squirrels are that there are black squirrels coming and they are bigger and feistier and can outfight and are not affected by the virus, so the grays will probably have their comeuppance at some point. Anyway, that was the basis for my writing the book, but it’s not about the actual war. It’s about talking animals.
Any short stories coming out, maybe in an anthology in February?
I am going to have a story in Oz Reimagined called “Blown Away,” which takes place in Kansas, a sort of reimagined Kansas in which, well, I’m not going to give it away. But it has circuses and freaks, a couple of people from a freak show, and not one but two twisters and a couple of surprises. Especially what happens to Toto.
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:
John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor of Lightspeed (and its sister magazine, Nightmare), is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Oz Reimagined, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, Other Worlds Than These, Armored, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a four-time finalist for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec,and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year,and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2,and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Bootcamp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.
Interview: Brandon Sanderson
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Brandon Sanderson has published seven solo novels with Tor—Elantris, the Mistborn books, Warbreaker, and The Way of Kings—as well as four books in the middle-grade Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series from Scholastic. Two novellas came out in 2012: Legion and The Emperor’s Soul. He was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series; 2009’s The Gathering Storm and 2010’s Towers of Midnight were followed by the final book, A Memory of Light, in January 2013. Tor Teen will release the YA fantasy The Rithmatist in May 2013, and Dela
corte will release the YA post-apocalyptic Steelheart in September 2013. Currently living in Utah with his wife and children, Brandon teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.
As we’re recording this, the release of A Memory of Light is just days away. So what will you be doing on the day that the book comes out?
Well, I’ll probably be sleeping at first, because the night before I’ll be doing a midnight release party, and those tend to go pretty late. And then I’ll be flying—I believe Minneapolis is the first stop. And I’ll be doing a signing there that evening.
Tell us about the midnight release party.
Well, for quite a while now, my fans have wanted me to do midnight releases, and so what we do is we pick a bookstore. It’s been BYU bookstore for a while, since it’s the only local independent in Provo. And we’ll go there and I will pre-sign all the books to make it easy on people, and then we have a party. At midnight we start selling the book. People can grab their book and take off with it, or they can come and wait in the extremely long line to get it personalized by me. We do number the books at the release party, which is also kind of fun.
And Robert Jordan’s widow will be there, right?
Yes. Harriet’s coming for the first time. She’s going to come on down and we’re going to have her sign all the books too. We’ll do a Q&A reading thing beforehand, and then Harriet is going to go back to the hotel and go to bed while I sit around and sign books until 5 AM.
Are people camped out on the sidewalks already?
Yes, they are indeed. Someone really wanted book number one, so he came I think a good two weeks early and started camping. It’s not particularly pleasant outside in Utah in December and January, so these are real troopers.
Have you been over there to bring them hot chocolate or anything?
I haven’t yet. I usually stop by once or twice during the lines, but I haven’t stopped by as of yet. I live a lot further from BYU than I used to.
I think a lot of fantasy and science fiction fans have grown suspicious about whether and how long-running series are going to end. And I think a lot of people are probably wondering, is this really the end of The Wheel of Time?
The honest truth is, I don’t get to say. It’s Harriet’s story now, not mine. Harriet and I have talked about it, though, and both of us feel that this should be the ending. The last thing Robert Jordan wrote was the last chapter of this book. I don’t think Robert Jordan would have wanted us to go further, and I think that if we went on, it would be too much of me having to take over. For these last books—that were really just one book in his notes—I’ve been able to follow his outline fairly closely. And yes, there were holes and things like that, things I had to do, but I had an ending in sight, which was the ending he’d written, and that has guided me all along. That kept it in the realm of being his story that I’m writing, rather than my story that I’m taking over.
Do you think people are going to be satisfied that this pretty much ties up most of the loose ends and there’s not a huge cliffhanger at the end or anything like that?
Yeah, I felt when I first read it that it was a satisfying ending. I felt it was the right ending. It’s been my guidepost for all the work I’ve done on this. There are going to be some holes. Robert Jordan told fans before he passed away that he didn’t want everything wrapped up neatly with a bow. And so there are no major cliffhangers, but there are some indications of things that happen after the series, things that continue on. He had planned to write a sequel trilogy, and people are aware of that. So naturally there are going to be holes regarding some of the characters he was planning to put in that trilogy.
What if somebody wants to know how the story ends, but they don’t want to read all fourteen books? Could they jump straight into this one?
I would really not suggest that. If people wanted to jump in, the place that I would suggest jumping in would be book eleven, which is the last one Robert Jordan wrote, and which is the one that really starts to take the focus toward an endgame. If there are Wheel of Time fans out there that read the first few books and then said, “I’ll finish it when the series is done” and things like that, book eleven might be a good place to come back to it. That one’s called Knife of Dreams.
I heard that one chapter is around 50,000 words long and contains seventy to eighty viewpoint characters. Is that true?
It’s actually a bit longer than that, but has fewer viewpoint characters. I think it’s about 70-or 80,000 words. There are around seventy viewpoint shifts, but there are a lot of repeated viewpoints. So yes, there’s this massive chapter. It’s one of the things I planned from the beginning, and like a lot of things that I tried that are a little out of the mainstream for the series, I pitched it to Harriet and said here’s why I think it would work and why I think it will be a great chapter. And she went ahead and let me get away with it—as she frequently did in working on these. So yes, there’s a big, awesome, meaty, long chapter at the end of the book. It’s not the last chapter, but it’s one of the last chapters.
I heard you say that this book contains a lot of big battles, and since you’re not a big military history buff like Robert Jordan was, you needed some help with those sections. Who did you consult with and what sort of details did they give you?
Harriet is friends with Bernard Cornwell, and went to him for a bunch of advice on this, so we used him as a military expert. Also, Robert Jordan had two assistants. One of them is a military historian. He knows the military; he’s been in the military. Those scenes were very heavily looked over and edited by him.
I imagine you must have had to endure a lot of people being like, “Hey, man, you don’t know Rand al’ Thor, man.” Have you just had to develop a thick skin for that?
Yes and no. I mean, I was part of Wheel of Time fandom before I was given this project, so I know Wheel of Time fandom, if that makes sense. So when the Wheel of Time fans pick on certain characters—it’s usually Lan or Mat—they’ll say, “Hey, you don’t know Lan.” Well, I do know Lan, and my interpretation of Lan differs from yours. We could spend hours on forums discussing our different interpretations of characters. Nothing’s changed from the time that I was just a fan to writing now. We would have had that same big, massive discussion on that forum back then as we talked about our different interpretations. And that’s one of the factors people have to deal with in me picking up the series as a fan. I am going to bring my interpretation as a longtime fan of these characters. In some cases they’re spot on with what most people think. There haven’t been many complaints about my Perrin, for instance. And in some cases, there are complaints and they’re right. My early Mat was off. I acknowledged this. I looked at what people were saying, but in other cases, such as Lan, they’re wrong. [Laughs] What can I say? I’m a fan too, and we will have these arguments about whether this character would do this or that character would do that, and you’ll find that in any community.
On the other hand, I do get complaints, and in some cases the complaints are legit. I’m not Robert Jordan, and I can’t do some of the things that he did, simply because I don’t have his life experience and in many ways I’m not as good a writer as he was. He was a fantastic writer at the end of his career, after having grown and progressed for decades, and I’m a new writer. I’ve only been doing this for ten or fifteen years or so now, so I’m not as skilled. In some cases I just have to apologize and say I can’t do it the way that he would do it. I have to try to do it the best way I know how to do it. Anyone who has gripes like that, they’re legit gripes and that’s a good reason to not like the books, and I’m fine with that. And if that really bothers you, then hopefully we can get the original notes released. That will be Harriet’s dec
ision. After the fact, I would like to release them, so that those for whom my interpretation was not good, or my failings ruined the experience for them, they can at least look at what Robert Jordan had and imagine their own story.
I’ve heard you have 50,000 unread emails in your inbox. Don’t you worry about all the exciting business opportunities in Nigeria that you’re missing out on?
Yeah, that’s not even my spam box. I’m bad with email. I’m so bad with email. Fortunately, I do have people combing those inboxes, watching for important emails that come my way, and I try to read a lot of the fan mail. It’s hard to answer it all, but I try to read it, at least. I love what social media has done. It creates this great connection between author and reader, which is wonderful, but it also means a lot more opportunities to do things other than writing. And it seems like the last thing I need in my life are more reasons to not be writing. People who know me know that sometimes you have to send a dozen emails to actually get ahold of me. That’s just part of dealing with a guy who spends most of his time trying to focus on the storytelling.
