Robert Jordan wrote many words in all of his books, but did you know he wrote blog posts too?

Dragonmount was the home to Robert Jordan's blog when he was alive, sharing his thoughts as he proceeded through the creation of the series. 

Who knew that here in 2025 we would be honored to host additional unpublished words that he wrote.

Today is a very special day because it is Tom Doherty and TOR's birthday! TOR is the publishing house that has published all of Robert Jordan's books and Tom Doherty is the founder of TOR.

As a birthday present, we have been gifted a previously unpublished letter to Tom Doherty from Robert Jordan written in 2005.

And we gift this to you, dear reader, to celebrate Tom's 90th birthday.

  Quote

With the exception of one book with Dell, and one with Popham Press, my wife’s imprint, all my books have been published by Tom Doherty.  Come to think of it, Popham Press was distributed by Ace when Tom was publisher there, so he was (at the least) the distributor of that one, too.   And he reprinted both of those books later, at Tor.  In fact, I guess you could say it’s been a clean sweep.  Excluding a handful of short pieces, Tom has published everything I’ve ever written.  That isn’t by accident.

 

I first met Tom in offices that very much resembled the publishing office in Kavalier and Clay.  Yes, they did.  The old Zazy Building, in Manhattan, with its old-fashioned, wall-less freight elevator that we used about as often as we used the main elevator because that was only intermittently in service.  But then, the freight elevator had a habit of getting stuck between floors, too.  Of course, sometimes you got to ride up with models on their way to a garment business that occupied one floor.  There was a doorman, or at least a guy who sat in the lobby wearing a jacket and tie, and on several occasions he decided to go out to lunch and lock the lobby, leaving anybody who was outside at the time to wait on the street for his return.  There were a number of greasy spoons, or very nearly, in the area, but the best food was actually at a strip club about a block away.  That should tell you something.  Who says you can always find a good restaurant in New York?

 

The offices were tiny.  Of course, when the people filming the Jack Nicholson movie “Wolf” came to look at Tom’s current office in the Flat Iron Building so they could make Jack’s office in the movie look “real,” they were shocked.  It is MUCH bigger than that first office I saw him in, where you walked in the door and took one step to reach the chair in front of his desk, with just room behind it for his chair and some bookshelves, but it seems that in Hollywood, the fourth assistant to the second assistant best boy has larger, so you know how small that original office was.  Real Kavalier and Clay stuff.  The bookshelves often fell off the walls, too.

 

Tom ran an open office.  Not open in the sense used today of no walls, but a place where writers were welcome to drop by any time and hang around as long as they wanted to, chat with the editors, drink coffee and shmooze.  He still does.  You’d be surprised how few publishers – or editors! – want writers around any more than they absolutely have to put up with, but Tom likes writers, likes to be around them.  There are reasons that every writer I know likes Tom in return and enjoys working with him more than working with any other publisher in the business.  Of course, if you hung around the office long enough, you’d end up reading slush.  That’s unagented submissions, for the three of you who don’t already know, and a more dire task than reading slush cannot be envisioned short of Dante’s seventh circle.  But we liked to hang around, so we read.  Hey, maybe you’d find a diamond in all that dross.  Then again, no way.  That’s how I met John M. Ford, Mike Ford, who became a close friend.  We were reading slush for Tom.  I met some other friends there that way.  There were always three or four of us, sometimes eight or ten.  A mini-con for writers only.  I wouldn’t be surprised if writers who hang around the present Tor offices find themselves doing the same.

 

There was one other thing about those old offices that I, and every writer I know who visited them, liked immensely.  You could walk into Tom’s office, pitch a book, and if he liked your idea, the two of you would walk down to the contracts department – one woman, a door down from Tom – where you signed the contract, then walked one more door down to get the check cut for your signature money.  I remember pitching The Wheel of Time to him in that office.  He scribbled a number on a piece of paper, asked me what I thought of that, and we walked down the hall.  I doubt it could be done that way today, but Tom has kept the feel such that you believe it could.  There are reasons every writer I know....

 

From the beginning, I liked Tom.  He is always smiling, always upbeat.  I have never seen him frown, never seen him angry.  “Life is too short for that,” he tells me.  He laughs at my jokes, and always did.  That is an endearing trait in anybody.  He knows more about publishing than anybody I’ve ever met, including my wife, and that’s saying something since Harriet has forgotten more about publishing than most people in the industry know.  He’s always willing to try something new, new ways of marketing, new kinds of books.  It was Tom who came up with the idea of printing nearly the first half of The Eye of the World and giving it away for free.  Not free with the purchase of another Tor book.  Not a few sample chapters.  Almost the entire first half of the book, stacked beside the cash register, pick one up and take it away.  Any other publisher hearing me pitch, not a trilogy, but something that would run to five or maybe six volumes – that’s how long I thought it would be back then – would have tossed me out on my ear, or maybe said, “I’ll take the first book, and we’ll see what comes of it.”  Tom said, “I’ll make it a contract for six books.  If it comes in at five, you can do something else for the sixth book.  I like the way you write.”

 

Barry Sadler, of “Ballad of the Green Beret” fame and author of a number of adventure novels, once said to me, “Tom Doherty is best of breed.”  It’s true.  I cannot imagine a better publisher, or a better friend.  It has been nearly twenty-five years that we have worked together.  I hope there will be that many more.  At least.

 

– Robert Jordan

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Happy Birthday, Mr. Doherty. Thank you for everything you have done for The Wheel of Time. And thank you to Robert from Tor for sharing this letter with us and to Harriet for allowing us to publish this.