A: Uhm, no, there is no possibility that it will never end. I will wrap up all of the major storylines, I will wrap up some of the minor storylines, other minor storylines will be left hanging, and I'm going to do worse than that. I am going to set a hook in the last scene of the last book, that will make some people don't believe what I say, think that I am setting up a sequel. What I am doing, what I will be doing, is trying to leave you with a view of a world that is still alive. One hope that some fantasies have is that when you reach the end of the book, or you reach the end of the trilogy, all the characters' problems are solved. All of the things that they have been doing are neatly tied of in a bow, all of their world's problems have been solved. And there's no juice left, there's no life left. you think 'I ought to set this world on a shelf and put a bell-jar on top of it, to keep the dust off. When I finish the Wheel of Time, I want to do it in such a way that you will think it's still out there somewhere, people still doing things. This story has been concluded, this set of stories has been concluded, but they're still alive.

A: No, I will not continue writing it, I will be going on to something else, and nobody else will continue writing it, because I have an automatic contract set up that if anyone tries to share-copy my world, their knee-caps will be brought to me.

A: Another fantasy novel, or a set of novels. More compact, I hope. That's I've been working on it, you might say, in the back of my head for five or six years. A different world, a different set of circumstances; different cultures, different rules, no connection really, at all, to the world I'm writing about now. [Heh, seems even Jordan might want to have given Randland a name in the beginning so that we could refer to it as something other than Randland.] I want to make things different. [strong] I don't like doing the same thing again. [Referring to answering certain questions?] It's a trap that writers find it very easy to fall in to. Fans say 'tell me the story again, tell me more of the story' and the writer wants to do a different story. But the fan who loves this story says 'tell me this story again.' [loud] 'I want the story again, daddy!' [laughter] So you tell the story again. And it is very much like telling the story to your child, because if you always tell the same story when the child screams 'tell me the story again, daddy' you find out you can never ever tell a different story, that that is the only story that will be accepted. And I won't do that. I hope you come along with me, when I go on to different stories. But if you don't, I'm still gonna write the different stories. [laughter]

A: Yes they do. They hang on to what you would call 'vitality' longer than the average man, but they live a normal lifespan. They do get things out of the bond, but not a longer life.

A: Uhm No, you'll Read And Find Out.

A: I don't really that any of the major characters are very much like me, although there's some bits in Mat that remind me of me when I was younger. I think of myself as Lan, my wife says I'm Loial.

A: Well, the parallels are conscious, but I've taken, I've tried to take come care that there's no exact duplication. There are bits from this culture and this historical period, and this sort of other culture and other historical period, fitted together to make this culture or that culture. You cannot look at the Sea Folk for instance and say 'Oh yes, ah well, that's from India. That is the culture of Japan, or India, or China, or England, or whatever.' Because there is no single culture in that way. The Aiel (eye-eel) for example have bits of Zulu, and bits of Apache, and bits of Cheyenne Indians, and bits of Bedouin and bits of Japanese cultures, and also some things that I simply thought would be neat. So I could fit them into the culture.

A: The Seanchan also are the melting of things that have come from many different human cultures to make their culture. There have been many rigid stratified, rigidly hierarchal cultures. It's a very human thing. The concept of being able to climb above your station is a relatively new one in human culture. You were born where you were born for a reason, and that is the place you will stay, that has been the norm for human culture, for most of history. I mean, even thr groups the Whitecloaks are the people who know the truth. Not just truth, they know Truth, they know Veritas, they know Truth with a capital T, they're the Taliban, the Klu Klux Klan, they're the poeple who know the truth and you must believe their truth or they will kill you. but they're not the Taiban, they're not the Teutonic Knights, they're not the Klu Klux Klan. They are simply that concept.

A: Well, the difficulty with the pictures was something that I did not discover until far too late, the artist who was hired to do the pictures see, this was done by a packager. Someone who came to me, and done guides before, and came to me and said 'I would like to do this, and here is one I did for Marion Zimmer Bradley, and here's the one I did for Bob Silverberg, and here's the one I did for Jack Vance, and would you, you know ' I said alright, this looks good, and I called up these people and they said that things went well, but my publisher the artist was hired to do a certain number of black and white drawings. And as soon as this guy got the package together he went to my publisher, my who said yeah, I'd like to publish this. And my publisher said 'No, I'd like to have color drawings, not black and white, and you want to do x number of drawings, but I would like five times as many illustrations. And that was all good, except that the artist contract what I did not know was that the artist contract called for a flat fee. And the man who put the package together did not increase the amount of money that he was going to pay the artist. The artist was then asked to do five times as many drawings, in color, instead of in black and white for the same amount of money. His enthousiasm dwindled. [laughter] Now if I had known about this, I would have given the artist some money out of my own pocket, to get better pictures. I couldn't understand why the man who had sat in my study, and drawn such wonderful sketches just from my of-the-cup descriptions, was suddenly making drawings that seemed very not very good. But that was the reason.

A: A japanese company contacted me about doing an animated movie. I told them no, because they wanted to do a movie based on two or three books, and I said 'no, I won't do that.' Then he talked about NBC acquiring an option about doing a miniseries based on the first book and options to buy options on the other books, and that there was quite some progress made by the people involved and then "those people promptly left NBC" and NBC has let the option lapse It's a chancy thing. I would not support anyone doing a feature film of, say, The Eye of the World. I do not think it could be compressed into three hours. Certainly not into two. That would make it incomprehensible. But the screenwriter makes further changes, because, although it's a collaborative effort, if the director says I don't like this, do it some other way, do it this way, and the screenwriter does that. And if the screenwriter doesn't do that, they'll get another screenwriter. And then the actor says 'I don't believe this character would say this.' And the actress says I don't want to do that, see, I want to do it this way, so they change the dialogue, and they change the scene. And the director, again, comes up and says 'I think it should be done in this fashion' and he shapes it. And what goes up on the screen bears, you hope, some resemblance to what was on the page.

A: That power is never given to a writer of a book, believe me. I know that there are websites, more than one, that have sections or they have posts that this actor or that actress for this role or that role. I don't htink I've ever really thought about it. To me a movie is something that would be nice if it happened. A miniseries. If Thom should be Sean Connery or Patrick Stewart. I'm sorry, I simply have never thought about that.

A: I saw the computer game as a way to attract people to the books. That's why I agreed, when I was approached by gaming companies, who started wanting the rights. But I also wanted it to be something that was going to be decent. So when I signed the first contract, I made sure there was a particular clause in the contract. And they brought me the plans for the game, now, they'd showed me a couple of games that they'd done previously. When they brought in the plans for the game. What they had done with that was file away the numbers off the previous games, took the files' serial numbers off, and put some whiteout over the names, and blacked out the names for my book into the over their old games. And I said no. I don't like that, I would like you to do this, and this, and this. I would like this to be possible, and that to be possible. And they said 'well, we can't really do that' And I said 'well, ah I guess well, there is this paragraph 24, subparagraph z, and I'm invoking that now, and here's a check, that's the money you gave me, goodbye.' Go away. Here, I'm giving you back the money, go away. So they were shocked. And they came to me and said 'look, no, we'd really like to do this, and we'll do the things that you'd like to do. Well, they did. Took them over two-and-a-half years. they had to sell their company to a bigger company to get the money to finance it, [laughter] but that was okay. And I liked the fact that one review said that they'd used the UnrealEngine better than Unreal did. I liked the fact that they were hired based on my game, the game based on my books, that they were hired to write the next Unreal game, the sequal to Unreal. I like the fact that although the Unreal Engine turned out to be incapable of doing some of the things that I wanted them to do, because they knew about these things that I wanted them to do, they were hired to rewrite the Unreal Engine so that it could do the things that I wanted it to do that previously it could not. What is going to happen, I don't know to do more computer games. But then a French company bought Legend GTI and Mike said 'they've told us, we must go into a new direction' and I asked 'what is this new direction?' and he said 'I don't know, they won't tell us. They say we're supposed to wander around until we find it.' So I don't know what's going to happen there. I think maybe there's been too much wine before the meeting but I have no idea what will happen there. I think the game is visually beautiful, but I've never played it, because I don't play that type of game. When I'm on a computer and I'm not working, which is not very often, I play chess, or perhaps a strategic simulation of a battle. Free-fight games for every war, that sort of thing.

A: I do. I like to make the reader think that he or she knows exactly where I am going, exactly where I am taking them, and they're certain that I'm taking them to that corner of the room over there, and suddenly they blink and realize that I've taken them to that corner of the room instead, and yet when they look back, they see it was all there, yes, all of it, very clear that I was taking them to that part of the room, instead of that part of the room. So, it's like it's like making your wife think that you're taking her to Paris, but in actual fact you are taking her to Rotterdam. [laughter

A: Oh, I think hard work plays a big part, I try to write at least 8 hours a day [6/7 days a week. Inspiration comes from hard work.

A: There's a strict border between my writing and the rest of my life certainly, but the story involves itself in my head. And I continually think about it. I'm always thinking about how I'm going to structure things, how I want the flow of words to work, the rhythms and patterns of words. The difficulty is, I must I have two rituals at night that are necessary. If I fail. The first is that I read someone else. And I must read for several hours. And then having read for several hours, work myself from the books, I must make sure that there for half an hour or so, I won't drift back with my thinking to my own books. So I drink a very, very large brandy Yes, 6 or 8 ounces. And just straight down. And this makes me sleepy enough that I will drift off, and that's the night.

A: Yes. There is an exception in, he works for the New York Times, a culture editor, not a literary editor. But that's very good. He seems to understand what I'm writing about. But fantasy is by and large dismissed as less.

A: I have a list of the books I might want to write. I continuously add things to it. I used to keep it on paper, in a notebook and the notebook became full. That was just basic, basic plotlines of thought of what I'd like to write here or there or the other thing. And I realized twenty years ago that the list of books I wanted to write, the stories I wanted to write was impossible. I would not live long enough. I would not live long enough if I lived three or four lifetimes. I would have to live at least five or six lifetimes to complete the list as it then stood. So, you make choices.

A: The next series, the one he's been working on in his head for a few years now, will have one culture that is much more readily apparent as being 17th, early 18th century at technological level, cultural levels. I dislike the view of the world of the Wheel of Time as medieval. I think of this as the 17th century, as it would have developed without gun powder. Look at the things, I mean, moveable type and printing presses and books are not uncommon and mechanical clocks and a lot of other things. If you look at what's going on you'd realize that we're not looking at a medieval world. We're looking at the 17th century, minus gun powder.

A: Err, they are Oh, uhm, no, it is gone. It is gone. And it ceases to exist in any form that you could of as real.

A: Err, not the same thing, but they must coexist. The thread can be removed; you die in this world. You die and the soul remains to come again and begin another thread. The soul disappears from this Gray Man, it's gone. Think of the Dark One as having eaten it. It's a fiction, but a convenient fiction for the moment. The thread of the Gray Man remains until the Gray Man dies, physically.