River of Souls; a WoT official short story coming in 2013

[Southpaw89]

Dragonmount just posted an article on Twitter about a WoT short story coming out in spring 2013 called River of Souls. What do you guys think about this? Did Brandon write it based on RJs notes or what?

[claireducky]

Well, it's tagged as both of them as authors, obviously.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx < a river of souls in mythology.

 

 

EDIT: link to the press release about the new short story

[Mashiara Sedai]

Neh? I thought Brandon always insisted that he wasn't going to complete anything but the main three books? Either way: *squeals*

 

I can't wait! More WoT after MoL!

[bigdoug1971]

I thought Brandon had said he had no plans for outrigger novels. I guess nobody thought to ask him about short stories. Either way, I'll take any new WOT story as long as it's official and from RJ's notes and Brandon's pen. This is great news!!!!

 

The only bad thing is it's something else to wait on...........I have ZERO patience............Damn you WOT and ASOIAF!!!!

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Shawn wants the authors to record little video announcements for this, so we're going to do that on Tuesday and post it soon afterward. This will shed a bit more light.

[TLHansum]

Thanks Peter :)

[triadruid]

Indeed, thanks for the update!

[GB]

cool :) +1 on cannot wait

[Terez]

Brandon has revealed that it is a deleted chapter from AMOL, from the POV of someone we know, but not one of the main characters.

[Hopefire]

I'm guessing it's either Black Tower stuff, or that it's from one of the Chosen.

[Terez]

The video is up:

 

http://youtu.be/UtHQbOMiD-k

 

ETA: Transcript is in the database now.

[2RiversFan]

Very cool.

 

Not only are the proceeds going to a good cause, but we're going to get background on another character from WoT. This is definately a book I'll buy.

 

Edit to add: Does anyone else get the feeling that the thing Brandon doesn't say is that he's very proud of these particular scenes? I actually think that he wanted to say "This was some of my best writing". Perhaps I was imagining this?

 

Having said that and having heard Harriett's reasoning for not including them in aMoL, I agree with her; but I'm also happy she ok'd them to be in this collection of short stories.

[herid]

The video is up:

 

Thanks for the update. let's start guessing who the character in question is. I'm guessing Androl.

[MarkDiLillo]

So this was the part of the book that he did such a horrible job writing that Harriet made him flat out remove it rather than even attempt to fix it.

 

I'm guessing it is going to be a Forsaken PoV - maybe a PoV showing Graendal being reincarnated.

[Terez]

So this was the part of the book that he did such a horrible job writing that Harriet made him flat out remove it rather than even attempt to fix it.

 

That's not really what I got from that. If it was horrible (or, if you prefer, more horrible than usual) I don't think she would have let him publish it at all. What I got from this is that Brandon was doing his 'explaining motivations' thing, and that most of these motivations came from his head rather than from the notes.

 

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.

 

I think that's what he meant by 'daring', and 'new things I was adding, the things I was fleshing out'.

[MarkDiLillo]

I took it as him interjecting more of his material into the series that RJ never went into detail on and Harriet not particularly liking it. I am expecting it to be something like a dreamshard with a chapter or two of deep explanations for how it works.

 

Either way I am anxious to read it - though I wish we could tell at the end if it is RJ canon or a BS addition. The most annoying part of BS finishing the series for me personally are the little creative additions that he adds that are entirely unncessary. Dreamshard, dreadbane, the black vein Fade poison, etc. With 11 prior books and a ton of notes...there just isn't a reason for him to do that. I'm hoping that this River of Souls is not more of his creative additions and is instead firmly based on RJs notes.

[Pinzarn]

I took it as him interjecting more of his material into the series that RJ never went into detail on and Harriet not particularly liking it.

 

That is completely different than "he did such a horrible job writing that Harriet made him flat out remove it rather than even attempt to fix it".

[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.

[MarkDiLillo]

I took it as him interjecting more of his material into the series that RJ never went into detail on and Harriet not particularly liking it.

 

That is completely different than "he did such a horrible job writing that Harriet made him flat out remove it rather than even attempt to fix it".

 

Yes - you're right. I just automatically equate what I dont personally like about the new writing to bad writing and technically it is not the same in all instances. It may be written very well and just contain something like dreadbane. Or hopefully it is just written well and filled with good ol' WoT that we enjoy.

[GB]

So this was the part of the book that he did such a horrible job writing that Harriet made him flat out remove it rather than even attempt to fix it.

 

I'm guessing it is going to be a Forsaken PoV - maybe a PoV showing Graendal being reincarnated.

 

i am thinking a Forsaken too maybe

[kcf]

POV has been confirmed to be Demandred and some things he's been up to.

[Ryrin]

I hope we see more of these.

[Rufae]

POV has been confirmed to be Demandred and some things he's been up to.

 

Should be interesting considering how his scenes played out in AMOL.

[Agitel]

It was removed because Harriet felt like it introduced too much new information and character development for the last book of the series. Anyone who has read AMoL will be able to surmise what that new information is about. It was at her suggestion it be included in the anthology instead of something else. Mark D's comment about "this must be a piece that was too horrible . . . " is just way off the mark.

[mike hunt's here]

 

POV has been confirmed to be Demandred and some things he's been up to.

 

Should be interesting considering how his scenes played out in AMOL.

Great...not sure if this is a spoiler or not, but I'm not buying the book if its Big D's POV.