Whats the biggest challenge of keeping such a long story going?
Well, there are some critics who’ve suggested that I’m in fact not keeping the story going! Seriously, though–keeping focused, keeping the story in mind, trying to keep people feeling that things are moving forward, even when you’re advancing along a very broad front. With so many characters and so many plotlines, you tend to have to inch forward a little bit at a time. That’s probably the hardest part. Everything else is really fun, in the sense of getting to go back to other characters and take up other situations and so on. That’s why I like the big books–because it’s a juggling act, and being able to do something like that is pleasing to me. After the first big long epic fantasy, I said to myself, “Well, I’ll never do that again,” and I told my friends that if I ever started a big series again to please shoot me. My joke since then is that either I don’t have very good friends or they aren’t very good shots, because here I am in the middle of another one! I also realized at a cer
