Medieval Medley: First thoughts about The Wheel of Time, adaptations, and related stuff that I don’t want to write about separately (Part 1 because this is getting late and long)

All right, what to talk about tonight? Since I really haven’t dug back into Substack this holiday week, I might as well talk about what I have had on my mind, and most of that had centered around my growing interest in fantasy fiction. So, let’s dance around that for a while.

A Reading List

I probably mentioned it before, but before diving in to this bigger fantasy project, I’ve been taking a deeper dive into some of the fantasy I had read as a kid and getting into some books I thought were long overdue. I reread The High King by Lloyd Alexander (which held up far better than my middle-school memories had recalled) and started diving into The Lord of The Rings. Of the latter series, I’ve been pretty impressed, but I got started on it back when schools closed down back in the spring of last year. Sadly, I’ve been stuck somewhere in Part Two of The Fellowship of The Ring and always don’t find time to continue that. I even started to to a video review of it, but it’s been a long time since I posted one of those. I’m wondering if I can take those reviews, turn them into audio files, and convert them into this thing that right now is more of an experiment than a podcast.

One of the things I’m finding out about myself is that I find it tough to multitask, especially when I’m trying to fit in a full-time job on top of things.

Anyway, back to books. Over the past year, I’ve been casting around for another series to dive into, something more than my dips into Tolkien, GRRM, and Alexander. On the Reddit boards and some other places where books and fantasy were spoken of, I kept hearing about a massive fantasy series that seemed to loom over nearly everything else out there. It came up far too often for me to be a coincidence, or something that could just be ignored. That was the series The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.

The Wheel of Time

I’m going to be honest with you, I had no idea about this series, really, until last year. I had no idea until last month that they were planning to filming a television adaptation of the series.

For those not aware of such things, writing fantasy can be more than a little bit of a time commitment. As it turns out, Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney Jr.) had been planning this little tale for a while. He began planning and sketching out the series in 1984, back when I was still in elementary school. He actually published the first book Eye of the World (well, I guess his publishing company did that) in 1990. That was when I was in high school. By the time he died in 2007, after publishing 11 books and a prequel for just that series along, I was well into my 30’s and the father of two elementary kids. He spent time on his death bed getting things ready for another author, Brandon Sanderson, to continue on with the series. Jordan was thinking that it was going to be one more book to wrap up this epic story. That book expanded into three books and took Sanderson about five years to get done. But it did get done, 14 volumes of 4.4 million words, more than any other mainstream fantasy series out there at the moment.

As you can tell, fantasy can be a bit of a time sink.

That’s to be expected, honestly. You have to build a world, decide what past societies and cultures might be an influence, construct the very shape of your physical setting, design such things as magical systems, religions, and perhaps whole new species of beings. There’s all of that, and you have to build all of the regular stuff like characters, plots, themes, and all the like. It’s quite like science fiction in that way, actually.

So, on top of trying to dip my toe into self-publishing, figuring out how to reach out to prospective audiences, and all these other items, along with actually continuing to write fiction and this blog, I’m now going to try and fit this obsession into my life.

Like with Jordan’s work, this might take a while.

Sooo, this is my status as of now. I have purchased the e-book version of Eye of the World. (There’s no way I’d be able to fit in even 14 paperbacks in what I have for book storage.) It turns out my family already has Amazon Prime, so I’ve got access to the new television series as well.

As a result, I might start talking about my impressions of the book and the series, and get into a little bit about how I consume the books and television that I like. It might not exactly be a review, it might be more than a blog, and like the whole Wheel of Time series, it might take a little while to get through. The subject of spoilers might come up as well.

Anyway, that’s where I’m going to leave it for now. We’ll pick this up again soon. Take care, everyone.