Why yes, that is me standing with New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson. I hopped in the car last night with my endlessly understanding wife and made the two hour trip from Indianapolis to Dayton for a book signing. For some reason Dayton is the closest Tor will send one of their authors. A friend and I had to make the same trip a few years back to see Robert Jordan for a Knife of Dreams signing, but it would be nice if they’d send someone to Indy for the next book tour.
The Wheel of Time fans were out in full force for this signing. The place wasn’t quite as packed as for the R.J. signing, but there was still a healthy crowd there. A few women wore shawls or cloaks embroidered in the fashion of Green Ajah Aes Sedai, but by far the most elaborate costumes on display were two Asha’man who showed up for the festivities. Otherwise it was mostly a gathering of good-natured geeks happy to be seeing one of their favorite authors and to get a chance to talk with like-minded obsessives about the books.
There was one brief snag when I first arrived. They were handing out tickets to get in line for the signing, but I was told that you had to buy one of the books at the bookstore if you wanted to get it signed. This was a bit of a problem since I bought my copy of The Gathering Storm on release day and I’ve had my copy of The Hero of Ages forever. They were nice enough to let me through without much fuss, but it seemed odd that they would expect Wheel of Time fans to wait two weeks to pick up the new book.
One nice thing I noticed was the number of people who showed up with Brandon’s books in addition to The Gathering Storm. People working at the bookstore said that they’d sold through all of their backstock of his stuff as well. I started reading through his stuff earlier this year to get a feel for the new guy taking over The Wheel of Time and he’s quickly become my new favorite fantasy author after working my way through Elantris and most of the Mistborn series. And that’s not something I say lightly. I’ve only conferred “favorite fantasy author” on Tolkien and Jordan before this in my twenty-five years of voracious reading.
The Q&A session was abbreviated compared to what Robert Jordan did at the Knife of Dreams signing, but there was one question that approached Aes Sedai levels of intricacy that I thought bore mentioning here. One lady explained that she understood Brandon couldn’t reveal who killed Asmodean, but did want to know if he felt that the evidence for the killer was sufficient that it seemed obvious to him once he saw the answer in Jordan’s notes. I thought this was an excellent question since R.J. had always maintained that Asmodean’s killer should be “intuitively obvious” to anyone who read closely enough.
Brandon gave a response that would be worthy of any Aes Sedai as well, explaining that he’d spent so much time reading all of the various Wheel of Time theories online since around 1994 that his reaction upon finally seeing the killer’s identity was “Oh, so that set of theories was right.” But he also pointed out that out of roughly 2000 characters who have appeared in Wheel of Time so far there have been theories that account for how roughly 1900 of them could have been Asmodean’s killer. The example he used was “Tam killed Asmodean!” which got a laugh from the crowd.
So we know that someone out there has figured out who killed Asmodean, but we’re still back at square one since there has been a theory for just about everyone in the series killing him. Brandon did mention that the killer would be identified in one of the next two books, however, which is keeping with a promise that Robert Jordan made at the last signing I went to that he would reveal the identity. I’m still amazed that someone had the balls to ask R.J. the Asmodean question so bluntly at the Knife of Dreams signing.
Now wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if it did turn out that Tam somehow killed Asmodean and Brandon was just using some clever sarcastic obfuscation to throw us off the trail?
When meeting Robert Jordan I was so star-struck that I only managed to mutter a few unintelligible words while he signed my books. Thankfully I didn’t make that mistake this time around. I thanked Brandon for all of his work on Writing Excuses and told him how much I enjoyed his books without getting too fanboyish. My wife standing there acting as a nice counterbalance to my nerdiest tendencies probably helped on that count.
At the end of the night I came home with signed copies of The Hero of Ages and The Gathering Storm as well as an “I Killed Asmodean” bumper sticker and some other promotional swag they had at the signing table. All in all it was a pretty good geek out night for this Wheel of Time fanboy.
Really, they are. 
In this week’s episode of Book and Film we tackle the differences between the 1979 English translation of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story and the movie of the same name that came out in 1984. Most people who saw the movie back in the days before the Interent didn’t even realize that it was based on a book due to Ende successfully sueing to have his name removed from the opening credits of the film because he was so disgusted with the final product. So is a film that’s mostly fondly remembered by children of the ’80s really so terrible when compared to the book that it justifies the author completely disassociating himself from the adaptation? Give the podcast a listen to find out!
