You may recall from my JordanCon wrap-up post that one of the goodies I came home with (via the silent auction) was one of the original manuscript pages from The Eye of the World.

When I showed this page to Brandon Sanderson, he went shuffling through a tall stack of papers that was, in fact, the most recent manuscript copy of The Gathering Storm. He found the page he was looking for, pulled it out, and handed it to me. “Don’t read this until you read the whole book. But you’ll want this page because it goes with the other one.”

When I got home, I went to the local custom frame shop and had both pages mounted side by side in a custom matte. The page on the left is from EotW. The page on the right is from TGS. (Although the header still says “AMOL” for “A Memory of Light”; it had not been changed yet to reflect the new title).

Both pages have hand-written editorial comments on it from Harriet. The exception to this is the mark on the EotW page where Robert Jordan made a change in pencil. He changed Ba’alzamon’s line from “At last we meet again” to say “Once more we meet again.” (Significant change. Get it?)

Anyway, here are some photos. I’ve had to blur out the TGS page so you can’t read the text. Sorry. After the book is published, if somebody reminds me, I’ll go and publish the original photo.

Enjoy! (Click each photo for a larger version)

PortalStones.com, an up and coming WoT Role Playing website, has posted a large collection of videos from JordanCon 2009. This includes the now infamous Opening Ceremonies.

Download all of the videos at this link, or view them on YouTube: (Note, some videos are still being uploaded by a kind volunteer.) Special Thanks to Steve (”Roga”) for taking the time to tape all of these and make them available for everyone.

… And yes, that’s me embarrassing myself in the opening ceremonies.

If you’re having a hard time following along with the opening ceremonies, you can read the script here (PDF). Not that we stuck to it or anything….

Hi everyone,

Last weekend I attended the first annual JordanCon convention. Jenn (Kathana) can probably give you the actual numbers, but it seemed like there were about 200-300 people who attended, which is pretty darn good for a first year convention.

While I don’t have the energy right now to summarize the whole weekend, I WILL mention a few things.

First, the Opening Ceremonies. Jenn had asked me to be the “Toastmaster” for the convention, which I took to mean that I was to be sorta like the Oscar host. I had to come up with a plan to fill an hour and “break the ice”, introduce the guests of honor, and give people an idea of what was going to happen over the next few days. The idea I came up with was to “summarize” the first 11 Wheel of Time in a series of skits. I procrastinated until a few days before the event and eventually wrote a script for it. 40 pages. One sitting. O_O I was going to clean it up, fix the typos, and generally polish it for you, but actually, I like the idea of you seeing it raw. Here it is. It’s in PDF. This is what I emailed and printed for everyone.

(BTW – we had a few last minute changes to the script. The Dabel Brothers couldn’t make it, so we skipped that scene. And Will McDougal wasn’t there in time so web designer guru Ben Gunderson played Mazrim Taim. )

I’m sure it will be on YouTube soon. I have a tape that has half of the show on there. I’ve emailed some other people asking for the rest. If nobody else publishes it, I’ll see about putting it on YouTube myself, and updating this post.

For a more complete breakdown of what happened at the convention, check out Leigh Butler’s extremely verbose report on Tor.com. There’s another summary from the guy who played “Mat” in the opening ceremonies here. (Go read those and come back, okay?)

One of the highlights of the convention was the “reading” from the prologue of THE GATHERING STORM. It turned out not to be a reading, but an audio recording of Robert Jordan dictating the opening of the book. Now, if any of you have heard Robert Jordan speak, you know how powerful his voice was. It’s was like a deep storm, thundering right around you. Well, when you heard this recording, it was heartbreaking to hear how tired it was. It was recorded just 20 days before he passed away. The amazing thing though, is how compelling it still was. There were probably 200+ people in that room, and not a sound was to be heard. A third of the people in the room were probably crying by the end of it. It wasn’t that anything particularly exciting or dramatic happened in the narrative, but RJ’s voice, with its raspy cadence, was just overwhelming. It built the perfect tone for the scene: haunting, heartbreaking, and hopeful. It was truly the most transcendent moment of the convention for me. I don’t know if Harriet will ever publish that audio recording, but I hope she does. To hear his voice telling that story was a true privilege.

Oh, and if you’re interested, here’s a nice little summary of what was in that prologue opening. Spoilers, naturally.

On Saturday night, there was a silent auction for a wide variety of items; the proceeds to benefit charity. After an intense final few minutes in which I got caught up in a bidding war, I was lucky enough to win a page from the original Eye of the World manuscript, complete with hand-written edits from both Harriet and RJ.

The page is from the scene were Rand meets Ba’alzamon for the first time in the World of Dreams. The most significant of the edits on that page (and the reason why Harriet selected this page to be auctioned) was where Ba’alzamon says to Rand “At last we meet face to face.” You can see that RJ crossed out “At last” and wrote above it “Once more”. See the significance? Amazing to think what might have been influenced by that small edit.

Here’s a scan of the page. I’ve obviously watermarked the page. (Mostly so people won’t try to duplicate it). Click to enlarge and see the whole thing.

Now here’s the really cool part. Later that night, Saturday, I was talking to Brandon Sanderson. I showed him the page, and he did a big “Hmmm.” We were in his hotel room at the time, and he walked over to the desk where, “hidden” beneath his closed laptop was a large stack of papers. This stack was, of course, the latest manuscript for THE GATHERING STORM. He flipped through the stack and pulled out a paper, handing it to me.

(Potential spoiler alert!!!!!)

“Don’t read this yet,” he said. “It goes with that one you already have.”

I have not read it yet.
I do not intend to read it until I’ve read the book in full.
I will not scan it in or put it online. (So don’t ask).
(I can’t believe my inhuman will power!)

I did see that the page was full of red editorial ink marks from Harriet. My intent now is to take both pages, and frame them behind UV-resistant glass, and keep them in a dim wall in my house. I’ll take photos of the whole setup once the book has been published. (And yes, I’ll show the scanned page from tGS after its published if its OK with Harriet and Brandon)

It’s amazing to me that even though RJ has passed away, and despite the fact that we’re approaching the END of the series, WoT fandom is getting bigger and bigger. JordanCon is intended not just to be a celebration of Robert Jordan and the Wheel of Time, but of all works of art in his tradition. The convention will happen again next year, in 2010. Pencil it into your calendar. If you’re reading this, I encourage you to attend it. The people are amazing, and the memories will last a long time.

Hope to see you there
Jason @ dragonmount.com

A few months ago I had a lot of fun posting some links on this blog to WoT videos on YouTube. So I have taken it one step further and made a dedicated page on DM that links to these videos. Check back often and see what new things there are.

Here’s the page.

Enjoy!

I was doing some updates to Dragonmounttoday and ran across an old image I’d forgotten about. Check this out:

It’s an alternative cover to A CROWN OF SWORDS. I think I grabbed this directly from Darryl K. Sweet (the artist)’s website.

Now I’m not sure how these things work, but the impression I get is that Mr. Sweet is not the type of artist to do his work in Photoshop. As a result, I have a feeling that after the paint had tried on this sucker he either went and re-did the entire thing (not likely) or have to paint over the Rand you see there and paint the one we all know and uh… love. Notice also that the image above is flipped from the other one.

Why did all this happen? Did he make two pictures and give Robert Jordan (and Tor Books) a choice? Was he hired to do two versions? Or did he make this one and get asked to make the one which made it on the cover?

Alas, we may never know. Then again, we could just ask RJ or Darryl!

Hi, I’m Kathana and I do Jason’s dirty work for him here at Dragonmount.

A few years ago, a company called Precedence Entertainment marketed a WoT Collectable Card Game, kinda like Magic: The Gathering, only with terrible artwork and rules that no one liked.

Anyways, a few weeks ago, we found a M:TG customizable card creator thingy online and started making our own CCG. Most of it is sheer nonsense and Dragonmount in-jokes. There are a few of general interest however.

Jason made these two for us.

Honestly, I had no idea he was such a nerd.

Ben Gaidin made a couple.

Karana’s manfriend made us a few too. Here are a few of my favorites.

And Raijin made this one.

There are tons more on the forums. There’s quite a few silly ones, as well as some that I think would make a nice deck. Maybe we could build a WoT deck and play at Dragon*Con?

Recently I was trolling around on YouTube looking for videos to entertain me. (Come on, admit it, you do it to.) On a hunch I did a search for various Wheel of Time themed videos. Not suprisingly, I found quite a few. I’ve embeded most of them here. I think the last one is my favorite.

Did I miss some? If so, send me the link and I’ll post it up here with the others.

These first 3 are from a fan who attended Robert Jordan’s most recent book tour (in late 2005).

This is a neat little tribute video that somebody put together:

The Wheel of Time, as sung by… Avril Lavigne? What’s cool about this is that it shows how everybody “hears” different music when they think of books like WoT. I’ll probably write a whole article about this sometime.

This is a cool one. It’s the 3D animated opening to the “Wheel of Time” video game which was released around 1998 or 1999.

Well said Amy M…. Hey are you a DMer???? If so, reply here and say hi! You’re definitely not shy!

This made me laugh my pants off.

Ahhhh…. You’ve got to love WoT fandom.

Jason

Hi there. My name is Jason and I’m the guy that runs Dragonmount. Having been pretty deeply involved in WoT fandom for, God, nearly a decade now, sheesh, I’ve had a lot of fun experiences with things related to the series. But strangely enough, I’ve never really had a formal way to share some of the more obscure things. I mean, posting random jokes that I’ve heard Robert Jordan say, or learning about some really rare 1st edition book; these are all things that don’t exactly belong in the main news section of DM, ya know? For a while I would post things to the forum, or put them in the DM newsletter, but I always felt there needed to be a dedicated blog for it. And to be honest, I haven’t got the time to write a dedicated blog.

This is where the new “Our Community” section at DM comes in. “Wotever” is just one of several blogs written by members of our website. This one in particular will most just be my writings, but I might invite some other WoT veterens to share their crazy WoT stories too.

Here’s a taste of the kind of things I might talk about, whenever it comes to mind: Robert Jordan and his wife Harriet have the original cover painting to THE DRAGON REBORN hanging in the hallway outside their bedroom. One night Harriet woke up, saw this scary face looking down at here, and was creeped out by it. So she called Darryl K Sweet (the artist) and had him paint over it! So the original painting of that book cover no longer has Ba’alzamon’s face on it! If you’ve been around for a while and read all RJ’s interviews, you may have heard this story before. But I bet you’ve not heard that the original painting to THE EYE OF THE WORLD is missing. Yes, it’s flat out gone and nobody, not even RJ, knows where it is.

So that’s the sorta thing I’ll ramble about whenever I get time and think of a neat story or fact. You’re welcome to email me anytime: Jason@dragonmount.com