Reimagining the Ending of the Wheel of Time

March 16, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I did it! I figured out the ending of the Wheel of Time, or at least an ending, one that’s more to my satisfaction than the published version. Most readers love the last three books written by a substitute author, but not me. I found them too inconsistent, too many bizarre changes to the characters, too much contradiction to what Jordan had written, too much discontinuity, and too much emphasis on insignificant characters and not enough on important characters. Besides, the whole thing was just so ho hum. The last battle is imminent, but everyone acts as if it will be tomorrow or next month or even next year. They also think it’s their choice when to begin fighting the Dark One, as if the Dark One is just sitting around waiting for them to decide to act.

What truly irritated me was how the substitute author further developed the main hero. This hero went on top of a mountain, ready to kill himself because he thought life and his mission were futile, just as the person he used to be did 3,000 years previously, but instead he had a bit of a revelation — that people were reborn and kept being reborn because it gave them a second chance at love. And because of this rather simplistic realization, the hero (Rand) was suddenly cured of the darkness that the Dark One had been coloring him with, was suddenly cured of his growing madness and became melded with that 3,000 year-old-version of himself that had presented as a voice in his head, and suddenly became what fans of the books call “Jesus Rand.”

Although some Christ-like features can be read into the hero’s character, he was never supposed to be based on the Christian savior, but rather more of a hero like King Arthur (as well as the Fisher King from the King Arthur legends and savior characters from dozens of other myths and legends). But the substitute author seemed to have missed that point completely and overrode the cosmology inherent in the books with his own religious beliefs. Appallingly, when the two personalities of the hero melded, he became a caricature of what a messiah might be. He was so over-the-top perfect that it was creepy, not inspiring. His ancient persona had never been that perfect — in fact, it was reported that he’d been sanctimonious and proud. And the hero in his present persona had become angry, determined, hard, ruthless. So how did those two personalities become so utterly pious when integrated?

Even worse, instead of doing what he was supposed to be doing, preparing himself for the last battle with the dark forces, he wandered the world feeding the hungry, helping the poor, healing the sick (though he himself didn’t heal the sick, he had someone else do it), and rescuing soldiers who had fought themselves into a corner. Under other circumstances it would have been admirable but none of what he did would matter if the world was soon annihilated by dark powers that only he could fight but wasn’t. Still it fit — sort of. Several of the characters feared the hard person he’d become, thinking he should be strong instead of hard, able to laugh and cry as he prepared for the last battle, and so they approved the change.

Worst of all, despite acting so pious, he was still consumed with hubris — not at all a messianic trait — believing he was better than the Creator since the Creator had merely sealed the Dark One away, not destroyed it as the hero intended to do. And oh, yeah. Shortly before going into the battle to save the entire universe, he demolished one of the most powerful magic tools ever made because it was “too powerful to use.” Whatever that means. (Actually, what it means is, as the substitute himself admitted, that he couldn’t figure out how to use it and so got rid of it.)

One part that was supposedly written by Jordan that makes no sense at all, especially coming from someone who’d been a soldier himself, was that even though the hero accepted his death and willingly made the sacrifice, he supposedly left instructions for one of his followers to leave gold and supplies in a tent for him to find when it was all over (though he could have done it himself). But no. Just no. If you’re fighting the last battle, a battle for the entirety of existence, you can’t leave that bit of distraction, that sense that you’re not giving it your all, that perhaps you’re not committed to fighting to the death. If he survives, fine — then get someone to help.

All that is to set the stage for what I suddenly realized today would make a great ending and what actually should have happened besides adding needed conflict.

Forget that whole scene of transformation. Have him go to the last battle as he was, darkness, anger, hardness, madness, and all. In which case, he’d have all sorts of people trying to stop him. His allies who thought that if he fought the Dark One when he was so dark himself, would definitely try to stop him because if he won in that state of mind, it would leave the world worse off than it was. The women power wielders would definitely be against him even more than they already were because they could not control him, and because they believed he’d unloose the Dark One on the world before he could seal him up again and so lose the world to darkness. The misplaced army, the one the dark minions sent after him, would be mobilized against him by the forces of the dark.

Despite that, the hero manages to assemble the forces of light to tell them his terms for fighting the last battle. (To everyone’s horror. So many of them lavished hate on him through eleven books, yet they expected him to willingly sacrifice himself for them!!) After they all sign the peace accords he wanted, the world suddenly grows darker, as if the eternal night is coming, and the forces of the dark descend on them. Although the hero wants to stay and help fight, he knows his confrontation with the dark lies elsewhere. And so he reluctantly heads to the Dark One’s lair. Although he knows it’s his duty, he isn’t sure that he wants to save humanity since they had been set on destroying him.

There is a power vs. power struggle between the hero and the Dark One’s avatar that seems pretty even, but mostly the battle is a philosophical one between Rand and the Dark One rather than actual combat. (As Jordan intended.) So, there he is, almost as dark as the Dark One himself, determined to do his duty, though he’s not sure why. And then comes the battle — dueling scenarios of what the world would be like if the Dark One won and what it would be like if the Dark One was not just sealed away again as the Creator had originally done but instead was utterly destroyed.

After a few of these scenarios (perhaps one that made the hero cry and another that made him laugh) the hero comes to an understanding and acceptance of himself and his fate as the savior of the world. He also realizes the truth — that the Dark One is not a person but a cosmic force. A force of dark to balance the force of light to create the pattern of life that is woven by the wheel of time. Darkness without light is annihilation. But light without darkness is also annihilation. (Think of a blank piece of white paper. It doesn’t signify much of anything, but print black on white, and look what we have!)

So instead of on the mountain, here is where he has his miraculous revelation, the one that brings light to the world the Dark One had all but destroyed. In the vast light that ensues, those physically fighting the dark minions and losing, find the courage and hope and resolve for a final push. So while the hero is winning his own battle, sealing off the Dark One rather than killing it, the humans and the forces of light are also winning their bloody world-wide battle.

I love the irony that the dark force that tried to destroy him would be the very thing that facilitates his transformation, gives him back to himself, and makes him strong enough to do what he needs to do to overcome the Dark One. Gives me shivers! Something the published ending never did, that’s for sure. And it makes sense to me, which is even more important.

Of course, other things happen before, during, and even directly after the last battle as loose ends get tied up and other major characters have their own climactic endings. I’d definitely get rid of the repeated character arc for one of the other two heroes, have them act as the responsible people they’d already become, and make sure all three of the heroes meet up again, something the substitute didn’t do but seems to be a necessary part of bringing things full circle. I’d especially not ignore those characters that were most supportive of the heroes during their travails as the substitute did. But bits such as this are easy enough for me to fit into my interpretation of the ending.

I’ve spent weeks — months! — thinking about this, putting the puzzle together, but now what do I do with all that mental time? I’ve been searching for another all-encompassing project, but so far, haven’t found a series that is even vaguely interesting. I suppose I’ll go back to reading whatever comes to hand, but that idea seems a bit flat.

Oh, I know! I’ll start rereading the Wheel of Time! I must admit, it is a fascinating literary experience to go back and read the first book again after experiencing the huge character arc of the eleven Robert Jordan novels and seeing how far those simple country boys had ended up from their humble beginnings. And then, I’d have to read the second book, and perhaps the third . . .

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Fool’s Game

March 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I spent a lot of time researching the final books of the Wheel of Time saga, trying to figure out what parts Robert Jordan wrote and what parts the substitute wrote. Since there was no one place for the information, I had to comb through hundreds of sites and interviews until I came as close as possible to knowing who wrote what.

It was all suspect, of course, because even the parts that Jordan himself wrote were added to by the substitute. Occasionally, the substitute added just a few words, but those few words sometimes changed the thrust of the scene or at least diluted it. And even when the substitute hadn’t changed parts that were written by Jordan, they would have been subject to change if Jordan been able to write the entire ending himself.

Jordan was both a pantster (one who writes by the seat of his pants, who creates and discovers the story as he is writing) and a plotter (one who outlines, who knows the story before he writes). He knew the major points he wanted to hit as well as the end to aim for, but the journey to get there wasn’t plotted out. Which means that even if he had written a significant scene ahead of time to give himself something to aim for, by the time he got to that scene in the writing, things might have changed. In the books he finished, that was often the case, so it would probably have been the same with the finale.

He had supposedly written the final scene while writing the first book, which is why the end seems somewhat sketchy (both in the meaning of not being fully drawn and of not being totally true). The woman who helped the hero at the end was never named, had never appeared previously in the story, and was someone the hero didn’t know because I think at the time he wrote that, Jordan himself didn’t know. And yet, through several of the last books Jordan did write, he was developing a character who was foretold as someone who would help, so I have a hunch by the time he reached the end, this woman would have replaced the unnamed one. And if not, it would have been a grievously misplaced use of Chekhov’s gun. (Chekhov’s gun is a principle where every element in a story should be necessary. As Chekhov pointed out, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”)

Jordan did seem to delight in turning assumptions on end, and even though he said that not every prophecy needed to have a major resolution, still, to have a character who was fated to help the hero and who was central to other characters’ actions (they thought she would kill him), to end up simply having her place a pile of clothes and money aside for him to use if he happened to survive the last battle is not a big enough payoff for all the drama instigated by that prophecy, especially since the hero could have done that himself.

The point I’m trying to make, at least to myself, is that even the parts Jordan wrote are not canonical.

So, basically, for me, the entirety of the final three books are not worth the paper they’re written on.

I am beginning to see, however, why people revere the substitute so much. Not only do they prefer his style of writing (though why people would slog through millions of words of a saga if they didn’t like Jordan’s style, I don’t know), but otherwise they’d be left with the utter sadness of Jordan never being able to finish his epic. Sad for him, of course, and sad for us. I have a hunch his ending would have been visionary if not spectacular — all the issues readers had with his getting sidetracked had pretty much been resolved, and he was again focused on getting the characters to the last battle. Most readers, I’m sure, are just as glad not to have to contemplate what could have been and are willing to settle for what they were given.

Most. Not all. Not me. I keep thinking I should be able to figure out what the ending would have been because of all the clues Jordan had laced into the saga with foreshadowing and prophecies. The “hero’s journey” concept could be a clue, too, since that was a big part of the origin of the books, but in the end, it’s a fool’s game since there’s no way of knowing what would have come out of Jordan’s subconscious and what he would have discovered as he wrote.

Still, as a person who gets caught up in literary mysteries, I’m sure I’ll continue to do what I can to puzzle out the end, fool’s game or not.

 

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Using My Time

March 14, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The more I reread The Wheel of Time books, and the more I can retain those millions of words, the more the irony and the subtle humor become apparent.

In one scene, one of the heroes, who is being kept as something of a sex slave for a queen, entered a room where a bunch of women newly come to the palace were milling around. He had a bad feeling about the situation, and he stood there waiting for “one of the Forsaken [what the disciples of the Dark One were called] to leap out of the flames in the marble fireplace, or the earth to swallow the Palace beneath him.” That isn’t amusing, of course, but what is amusing is that although he didn’t know it (nor could anyone who hadn’t previously read the books in their entirety), one of the women in the room really was one of the Forsaken.

In another case, a woman who was sort of a slave caretaker (Robert Jordan created some appalling civilizations), thought that one slave’s new-found acceptance of her situation meant she was going to try to escape, and so doubled up on her conditioning. What I found amusing is that the slave keeper herself ended up being blackmailed into helping the slave escape.

Because of small things like this, which cannot be seen until a reread or two, I’m finding this read through to be more amusing and more touching than I expected. It helps, I think, that I skip the torture scenes. (Those Forsaken do love their torture. Oddly, most of them undergo just as much pain as they give. I suppose that’s what happens when you dedicate yourself to the Dark One. Since he’s also called “The Father of Lies,” you’d think that would be a clue to his nature, right?)

It also helps that I know so much mythology and history, long ago customs and costumes, and all the other bits that make up Jordan’s world, because the knowledge makes the books richer, though I miss a lot. In a passage I just finished reading, someone mentioned the seals on the Dark One’s prison, saying three were hidden away, three were broken, and no one knew where to find the seventh seal. Seeing “the seventh seal” written out like that was a hitting-palm-on-forehead moment for me. I don’t know why I never associated these seals with Revelations and Armageddon, though I should have. I knew the last battle was Armageddon, though in the books it’s called Tarmon Gai’don. I just never got the connection with the seals. Now I’ll have to go through the books and see if I can identify what seals were broken and how they affected the Wheel of Time world. Like the fisher in The Fisher King legend, the Wheel of Time hero is “one with the land,” which is becoming obvious as the hero’s tempestuous moments are reflected by stormy weather. So too must the broken seals have some sort of correlation with what’s happening in that world. As if there’s not already a headful of correlations to find!

I know there’s a lot of correlations between historical battles and those of Jordan’s, such as the off-screen skirmish called “Altaran Noon,” which was based on the “Sicilian Vespers.” Since I don’t know much about battles, I’m sure I miss a lot of what he intended. Or maybe I’m not missing what he intended — it’s possible he didn’t really intend for anyone to see what he was doing; it’s possible he recreated those battles for his own amusement since he was a self-avowed military historian. (Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a nuclear engineer, and before that, he’d served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, which contributed to his interest in military history. It’s also what inspired him to give his male characters their unique perspective about not killing women.)

I seem to be writing a lot about these books lately, but there’s a great deal to process, though sometimes I wonder why I want to. Still, I need to be doing something, and studying these books and this world is a good a use of my time as any. And who knows — if I can come to understand his world, maybe I can understand ours.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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A Tale of Two Authors

March 13, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The Fool, one of the major arcana cards in the tarot, symbolizes wanderings, unawareness, naivete, spontaneity, transition, vitality, the beginning of an adventure, the ability to embrace new opportunities. At times, it can also mean recklessness in the face of danger.

The Fool is often depicted as a young man with a stick, a dog at his heels. (In some tarots, this dog is replaced by a fox, which fits because the fool is often “crazy like a fox.”) He is walking blithely toward a precipice, apparently caring nothing for the possible dangers that lie in his path. He’s almost childish in his approach, believing that there are many opportunities in the world just waiting for him to explore and develop.

In Italian versions of the tarot, the fool card goes by “Il Matto.” In French versions, the card goes by the name of “Le Mat” or simply “Mat.” These versions give the name the connotation of “madman,” though in Arabic it means “a dead person.”

In The Wheel of Time, one of the major characters is named “Mat.” Everyone who meets him thinks he is a fool, and in fact, all through the books, that is the word most used to describe him. I thought he was simply an archetype, but when I studied the tarot, I realized he is definitely based on the Fool card. (And if not, it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore. Since the major characters in The Wheel of Time have tarot equivalents, either Jordan succeeded in writing the “all stories” epic he intended — a reimagining all our myths, legends, cultures — or the tarot itself is representative of “all stories.”) Not only is his name “Mat,” not only is his character based on all that the card symbolizes, not only does his character arc follow that which is outlined above, but he represents the Arabic definition of his name. As he once said, “I’m usually pretty good at staying alive. I only failed one time that I remember.”

The Fool supposedly goes in stages from a naïve country boy to a mentally ill outcast (and because of a cursed dagger, Mat truly did become insane for a while), to becoming one who has greatness riding on his shoulder, which Mat does. And through it all, even while Mat is helping save existence from evil cosmic forces, the other characters continue to see him as a fool.

And perhaps he is a fool. He’s the sort of person who will rush into a burning building to save people, cursing himself the whole time, while others just stand and watch. Most often, he rescues women, but as he has come to learn, “even if a woman needed help, if she did not want it, she made you pay for giving it.”

He’s also a character who has no sense of what he really is. Even as he’s breaking into a dungeon to rescue women who can’t rescue themselves, he insists he’s no kind of hero. He thinks he is selfish, though he is not. He’s a bit of a womanizer, but he only goes after women who want him. Though many women are charmed by him, he sometimes overestimates his charm. In one case, a woman was affronted at a slight given by one of Mat’s companions. “Mat offered her a smile. He knew he could smile most women into feeling soothed.” The woman sniffed at him and turned away, not soothed at all. “Most women, he thought sourly.”

Mat is a special character in the Wheel of Time. He only wants to drink, gamble, and cuddle with women, but instead almost always does what is right even if it lands him in more trouble. That trouble, in certain cases, means becoming a battle commander who garners immense loyalty from his men. He almost never loses a fight though he hates killing; he hates even more getting his men killed.

The humor of this character is subtly created by the disparity between who he thinks he is and what he actually does. This is utterly engaging, making Mat one of the few characters who’s fun to read.

Until . . .

Yep, until the substitute author. That writer has no idea what subtlety is. Has no idea what Mat’s appeal is. Has no idea where the character was headed. By the end of the last book Jordan wrote, poor Mat has grown up, accepts the responsibility he has fought against through all the first eleven volumes, and is truly poised to be the hero he was always meant to be. In fact, we begin to see beneath the “fool” to the tragic figure he is hiding behind that lighthearted mask. As he mused: “Taking responsibility drained all the joy out of life and dried a man to dust. What he wanted right then was a great deal of mulled wine in a snug common room full of music, and a plump, pretty serving maid on his knee, somewhere far from Ebou Dar. Very far. What he had were obligations he could not walk away from and a future he did not fancy.”

But the substitute erased Mat’s entire character arc, turned him back into that naïve fool, dressed him like a county bumpkin rather than the sophisticate he had become. Even worse, the author turned him into a clown without the underlying sadness that made him more than one dimensional. Apparently, the author knew Mat was supposed to be a bit of comic relief but had no idea why. And so poor Mat was set up in situations where he tried to be witty but made puerile jokes, got involved in clownish behavior where he played for laughs, was flippant for the sake of flippancy rather than to hide his true feelings, and often acted boorishly silly. 

The interesting thing is, Mat himself as Jordan wrote him was never funny, not even at the beginning when he was known as the town prankster. He took himself seriously, took life seriously, took his responsibilities seriously (even if he complained all the while), but never cracked a single joke, at least none that appeared on the page. Yet, for all that, he brought some lightheartedness to a series of books that could otherwise be rather dismal.

This is one of the reasons I keep up with my studies of the books even though (as you might have guessed) there is a lot I don’t like and cannot bring myself to reread. Not only is this series a masterclass in creating characters and archetypes with a few bold slashes of words, it’s also a study of the contrast between two authors. Though they are developing the same universe, they have two different writing styles, two different ways of presenting material (one is subtle in the storytelling, one hits you over the head with explanations), two different ways of looking at that world, two different senses of what humor is, two different real-world views that color their writing. (One was a soldier who understood the traumas of war and how soldiers dealt with the horror. The other was simply a writer.)

But the main difference? One, at his best, is brilliant. The other . . . never. Though oddly, (oddly to me, that is), most readers seem to prefer the substitute author.

P.S. Influences Jordan admitted he used to create Mat’s character are the Norse war deity Odin; the trickster gods — Loki, Coyote, and the Monkey king; Math fab Mathonwy, a Welsh figure of good fortune; Rommel, the desert fox; Francis Marion, the swamp fox. These last two reflect the “fox” part of the tarot card.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

 

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Jordan’s Women

March 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

One common complaint about Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time saga is that he didn’t know how to write women and that all his women characters are interchangeable. They aren’t interchangeable, and each has their place in the story, but because of the way Jordan inverted traditional gender roles, I can see why people think it’s true. Fans also say the characters don’t act like any woman they know, but the characters aren’t supposed to act like women we know.

In the Wheel of Time world, women have the assumption of power (in our world, boys and men used to have the assumption of power and the rest of us, no matter our age, were “just girls”). It was one of Jordan’s themes — turning gender assumptions on end. Those of us who grew up in his era understand why all his women characters treat men as if they are naive boys and why they never bothered to see things from their point of view — because that’s how boys and men treated us “girls.” As if we had no sense. As if we had no point of view worth seeing. As if we were so empty-headed we needed to leave all thinking to them.

But the world today is different from the one that existed when Jordan began developing his saga 50 years ago. (The first book was published almost forty years ago, but before the first word was written, he spent ten years researching and developing his ideas.) To younger generations, gender assumptions are . . . fluid, to say the least, so they can’t relate to that particular theme of Jordan’s. Still, the saga is a fantasy, a creation of a different world, so it should be read only from the point of view of Jordan’s world and not judged by current beliefs in our world.

Admittedly, I don’t like one of his major women characters, and don’t read her point-of-view chapters on rereads. Fans of this teenage character complain that other readers don’t like her because she’s a woman, that if she was a man, there would be no problem with her. (Which sort of illustrates Jordan’s theme, that she was acting like a man from an earlier generation.) But the thing is, people — men or women — who will walk all over anyone, lie, do anything to garner power, might be compelling characters, but will never be someone I like in real life and definitely not in fiction. This woman did not have a character arc — it’s a straight shot upward.

Whenever she saw someone with power, she did all she could to be like them, to become one of their group, use them, and then move on to the next group who could further her objectives. This is the most divisive character among fans — some women think this character is the real hero of the story (which isn’t surprising, since that’s what the character herself believes), while some (like me) see her as evil. The only reason as far as I can see that she doesn’t go over to the Dark One is that she’d have to swear fealty and be second-in-command at best. If she isn’t evil, she certainly portrays the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. She never changed, never had a moment of self-discovery or reckoning. Anything heroic she did was a side effect of her power grab. And she never stopped grabbing.

A second major character isn’t unreadable so much as she is the young heir to a throne, raised to believe in her right to rule and that she was superior to everyone else, always “sticking her nose in the air,” as one character described her. Despite that, of the three main women characters, she tended to be the most considerate (which isn’t saying a whole lot) and also sometimes acted as peacemaker between the other two. But even that isn’t as much of a problem as that a large portion of a couple of books are devoted to her claiming her throne, a story line that is way out of balance to the rest of the books and one, moreover, that does nothing to move any of the many plots forward. I have a hunch that Jordan planned to go somewhere with that whole subplot to make it less of an add on and more intrinsic to the story, but since the substitute author killed off her realm first thing when he took over, it became even more of a waste of words. As it is, her character arc is meandering, sometimes up, sometimes down, but never going anywhere since she doesn’t really change, just goes from being heir to the throne to being queen, simply becoming more of who she always was.

I started out liking the third one of his major women characters. She was a bit older than the other two, a healer and moral caretaker in the small town most of the heroes came from. Because of her youth, she had to bully people to make them see her authority, but still, she did her best to take care of everyone. She joined with the other heroes so she could look out for them but ended up dealing with a quest of her own. She became more and more of a bully as she tried to keep her place in the world, which irritated me until I saw her character arc. One by one, those she once had authority over turned the tables and she ended up subservient to each until there was only one left for her to bully. When she finally realized she had to give in to his authority too, she cried. That was the end of who she’d been. From there, though, she gradually built up her power base, starting with herself, until she became a true hero, the only one of the three women who did. An actual character arc.

(I wonder if Jordan planned that — one was too much, one too little, and one just right.)

There is another female triumvirate in the saga based on the legend of the three wives of King Arthur, who in Jordan’s books also represent the three aspects of the goddess — maid, mother, crone. (The maid is not a child but rather a warrior, a Maiden of the Spear. The mother is the queen mentioned above, who will have the hero’s children. The crone, though almost as young as the other two, represents the “truth teller” aspect of the crone archetype.) This “three wives” subplot is an unsettling part of the story for many readers (me, included), though it does make sense since Jordan is playing with our myths and legends, imagining what the sources might have been. The maid and crone have similar character trajectories to the queen/mother — ups and downs, with minor changes and an acceptance of their place, but mostly just becoming more of what they’d always been with no major arc that I can see.

Readers often point to the women’s annoying characteristics, such as straightening their clothes, messing with their hair, crossing arms, sniffing loudly, as proof that these characters are written badly, but these are tics, something every writer has. I can’t imagine writing four million words and having to constantly come up with different ways to show vexation or nervousness or disdain. The characters also spend a lot of time describing clothes, but the clothes give hints as to where they are and what they are thinking. It does make me wonder about his wife, though. Jordan says he gave every one of his women characters one of his wife’s characteristics, though he’d never tell her which ones.

In writing this, I developed a better sense of who these characters are, so I might decide someday to read every word of the whole series, including the parts that annoy me.

But maybe not. Since I know their arcs, such as they are, I don’t need to know anything beyond that. At least, I don’t think I do.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Stringing Stories Together

March 11, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I happened to read an old review of the Wheel of Time book saga, where the reviewer dismissed the massive work by saying all Jordan did was string together stories like The Lord of the Rings and Dune.

That made me laugh because that was sort of the point — an iteration of previous tales, stringing them together to create his world. No, Jordan didn’t copy those books. He simply paid homage to writers he loved, though there could be more similarity than maybe he intended because he used a lot of same sources as did those authors. What he did do, during the ten years he spent researching his world before writing one single word of the first book, was . . . well, research. He researched world myths, legends like King Arthur, folklore, history, costume, culture, war. Then he broke all that up into little pieces and rebuilt his world from those fragments of our past and an imagined future. There are few if any direct parallels to our word but instead there are multiple parallels for each character and culture.

For example, a lot of people think Jordan’s warrior culture, the Aiel, is based on the Fremen from Frank Herbert’s Dune since both are desert-dwelling warrior cultures, and perhaps Jordan did give a nod to Dune, but Jordan’s warrior culture is an amalgam of Zulu, Bedouin, Apache and Japanese cultures, and maybe some others. Their looks (pale skin, light hair, and light eyes) and their system of clan and sept is a parallel of old Scottish and Irish clans and septs. The Aiel are further connected to the Irish through the Tuatha’an, a Wheel of Time culture named after The Tuatha Dé Danann. And something I just discovered — their system of ownership, where women own the houses and everything in them, comes from the Cherokees. (In case you’re wondering, this puzzle aspect of the books is one of the reasons I keep rereading. It’s fun for me to dig out all the references.)

Jordan said over and over again that he wanted his world to be both our past and our future. As he pointed out, “You can look two ways along a wheel.” Also in his world, what goes around, comes around so that the characters in the books are the source of many of our myths and legends and we are the source of many of theirs. He said he wanted to explore what the nature and sources of our myths might be.

His explanation for why the myths and even the histories that the characters experience in The Wheel of Time are so different from ours is that what is remembered and how it’s remembered changes throughout the ages, like the game of Whisper, or Telephone, or Gossip, where someone passes a secret to the next person, who passes on what they heard to the next person, and in the end, what results is generally unlike what was originally said. His point was that things change over time, that stories change, that names change.

He points this out at the beginning of the first chapter of every book: “The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

When asked where he got the idea of a wheel, he said, “The name comes out of Hindu mythology, where there is a belief that time is a wheel. Many older cultures believe that time is cyclic, that it repeats. In fact, I believe the best thing the ancient Greeks gave us was (the idea) that time was linear and change was possible.”

That’s for sure! There is a fatalism to the books stemming from the wheel, where everything will be repeated when the wheel comes around again, though perhaps with minor differences. Which also gives them their belief that you can change your life in small ways, but not large ones. Not an easy philosophy to live under.

But I’m getting away from my original point: to say that Jordan strung a bunch of stories together is true. Sort of. But it completely negates the brilliance of the world he created — our distant past and perhaps our distant future.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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So Turns the Wheel

March 10, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So here’s something I don’t understand about the publishing decisions for the end of the Wheel of Time.

They chose an author based on a memorial he wrote for Robert Jordan, but that piece was more about how Jordan had been a big influence on him in his own writing career rather than about Jordan’s books. Admittedly, the memorial was a paean to Jordan’s writing and to the saga as a whole, but though he called himself a big fan, he barely knew the books. And he certainly didn’t seem to comprehend the characters or where they were going.

I do understand they wanted a proven author yet one who wasn’t so big that he couldn’t take the time to work on the ending of Jordan’s books, but even so, the writer they chose didn’t have the time to spend rereading the books or going through the notes that had been gathered for him because he had his other deadlines to meet.

Still, a major factor with the Wheel of Time, is that the books and the internet were more or less born at the same time and attracted the same age group. So there were many thousands of people who’d lived with the books their whole lives. While waiting for a new book to be published, they spent millions of words on hundreds of sites discussing the books and their theories of what they thought would happen. Some of these people gave brilliant analyses of the characters and the culture. One fellow in particular, a college student who was majoring in comparative religions, wrote reams of essays and had insights that gave him a major following.

So getting to what I don’t understand — with that amazing resource at their fingertips (literally at their fingertips since they’d be typing on a keyboard), why didn’t they use it?

They could have started discussions asking what loose ends there were in the myriad plots, asking about where they thought the characters should go and what they should do, asking what they’d most like to see at the end, asking about what needed clarification, asking what things that were foreshadowed still needed to happen, asking . . . well, asking just about anything. With all those thousands of people ready to discuss everything to do with the Wheel of Time, there’d be no need for the substitute to reread the books or go through notes that made sense only to Jordan himself. If nothing else, it would have been a good starting place. And the books would actually have been a continuation of Jordan’s story instead of filled with new characters and revamped long-standing characters because the substitute wanted to . . . actually, I don’t know what he wanted to do. Make the books his own, perhaps.

It’s funny that almost no one will criticize any of those last three books. I have no idea why they are so sacrosanct except that maybe people were glad to have any ending. Oddly, the bits of criticism that are let through the barrier of protection are blamed on Jordan, even though the points in question were completely the creation of the substitute author. Also, in one book of Jordan’s, the timeline wasn’t kept straight (the story for each POV character started at the same place, giving the book a feeling of repetition), which he later said he regretted. And so did his fans. They sure dumped on him for that! Yet when the substitute skewed his own timeline in one book so badly that he had a character in two places at once and another who was in a different timeline than the characters he met up with, no one said a single word.

I suppose, in the end it doesn’t matter. No one else cares, obviously. Nor will I once I forget those books completely. As it is now, I feel an itch every time I see something in Jordan’s work that was mangled by the substitute. For example, Jordan explained how one magical machine worked on its own to project a character into scenarios based on the character’s fears, and yet the substitute had people working the machine to create horrific scenarios for the one being tested in the machine. Nothing major. Just itchable.

It’s possible no one could have finished the series properly. The more I see all the foreshadowing that appears in Jordan’s work several books before the foreshadowed event, or find hints of wry humor and ironies that won’t be understood until later, or see minor characters that are threaded throughout the saga, or marvel at the subtleties as well as all that goes on beneath the surface, or understand that something that seemed to be a win for the side of Light was actually a win for the Dark, the more I am astounded by what Jordan was able to keep in his head. I had a hard enough time keeping the 100,000 words in each of my own books straight. (In one case, I had to use a bulletin board and hundreds of tiny pieces of paper each containing a bit of information to figure out the timeline.) I can’t imagine keeping millions of words and thousands of characters and hundreds of plotlines in my head. Nor can I imagine doing all this in a world of my own creation. (Long before I’d ever heard of the Wheel of Time, I considered creating my own fantasy world for a book or series of books, but I gave it up since I have a hard enough time imagining the real world, let alone a fake one.)

His writing technique probably precluded any other author, too, since he was both what is known as a pantster (one who writes by the seat of his pants, who creates and discovers the story as he is writing) and a plotter (one who outlines, who knows the story before he writes).

It amuses me to think we had that in common — that we both had major points we wanted to hit as well as an end to aim for, but the journey to get there wasn’t plotted out. But the rest of it? Keeping all those words and characters and worlds in one’s head? That’s not me, for sure!

Just one more thing for me to puzzle out when it comes to these books — not just what he wrote, but how he wrote.

None of this, of course, helps me with my own writing because I’m pretty sure I don’t have another book in me, nor does it help me to understand . . . much of anything, actually.

Which brings me full circle to the beginning of this article where I mention that there’s something I don’t understand.

And so turns the wheel . . .

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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Family, Friends, and a Reason to Celebrate

March 9, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I had the weird experience yesterday of living in two different time zones depending on what room I was in. In one room, it was afternoon, and in the other, before noon. It didn’t really matter, apparently, since it took me a while to realize that there were two different times in my house. I mean, I knew it was 12:30 in one room but immediately forgot what the time was. Fifteen minutes later, I went into the kitchen and there the time was 11:45. Figuring I’d misread the time in the other room, I went back and checked my phone again. Confused the heck out of me why I’d lost an hour in one room but not the other.

Then, of course, light dawned. Sheesh. Daylight saving time. Unlike my phone and computer, the stove and microwave don’t change the time automatically.

Neither does my body.

I never think the time change will affect me since I get up with the sun, but it does, mostly because bedtime comes an hour earlier (which really means an hour or two later since I’m not tired enough to fall asleep, so I toss and turn longer than if I had simply gone to bed an hour later).

I hope this moment of confusion isn’t indicative of what my old age will be like — a lot of confusion with (hopefully) a quick dawning of understanding.

Of course, if I’d looked at the calendar or continued my perusal of online articles, I would have been reminded, but I’ve been narrowing my focus to what is in my immediate surroundings.

And apparently, yesterday, what was in my immediate surrounding was two different time zones — MST and MDT.

I have been enjoying my narrowed focus. (Even though it’s an online activity, blogging is still a narrowed focus because what I see is the words in my mind being written in black and white.) It helps that the weather is nice so I can go outside to expand my horizons, but I’ve also been bringing my horizons inside. At least, I did on Saturday, which was the seventh anniversary of my buying this house.

The house anniversary is one of the few dates in my life I like to celebrate, and so does my next-door neighbor. (Apparently, I was an answer to her prayer for a good neighbor. Makes me feel special since I’ve never — to my knowledge — been the answer to anyone’s prayers.) To honor the occasion, she gave me these gorgeous roses!

She and a few other friends came to help me celebrate. It was nice that they couldn’t all come at once, so I was able to visit one on one or one on two which is best for me. I find more company than that causes me too much confusion, though unlike the time difference mentioned above, this isn’t age-related confusion (or whatever the problem with the time was) but simply the way I’ve always been.

My sister had asked what I wanted for a gift. Since I don’t need anything, I told her I’d like gifts for my friends. So she made me the most wonderful party favor kit, which was great on so many levels.

I had the fun of receiving the box of goodies, the fun of assembling the kit, and the fun of handing them out.

So, who needs a broader focus in life when one has family, friends, a reason to celebrate, and lovely hostess gifts to hand out!

I was proud of myself for cleaning up immediately afterward, so yesterday morning I woke to a clean house rather than a mess. Not that we left much of a mess, but I had to clear the table and do the dishes as well as finish the leftovers since I don’t like having cake and ice cream on hand. Though to be honest, I never have them on hand because if I do, they are too soon gobbled up, and neither of those treats treat me well.

So that catches us up on my news. I’ve been spending my blog time on topics other than me (though in a way, everything I write is about me or at least what I think), but there’s truly been nothing much going on in my life to write about.

Still, it’s been nice having this narrow focus even if it doesn’t give me a lot of fodder for blogging.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in being me, blogging, dealing with old age, home, house, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 7 Comments »

What Makes a Good Writer?

March 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram

What makes a good writer? Is good writing subjective, or is there a standard? Is a good writer necessarily a good storyteller?

I thought I was finished with such questions when I stopped writing books, but I don’t remember if I ever thought of these questions from a reader’s point of view. As a reader, either I found a book readable, or I didn’t. Either the story engaged me, or it didn’t. If I was okay with the book, I read it. If not, I read the ending, and if the ending seemed to be fitting (or a fitting reward for slogging through the book), I’d go back and finish the book. If not, that was the end of it.

For the past couple of years, I found myself not finishing most newer books, so I reread a lot of older books, many of which weren’t really worth reading again. Now, I figure if I’m going to reread books, I might as well continue my studies of The Wheel of Time saga, which brings me back to the questions I put forth above.

I’ve come across a lot of reviews and discussions where people say Robert Jordan is a terrible writer, which amuses me to think I’m immersed in the words of someone who is becoming so excoriated. (The substitute writer who finished the series is held up to be the epitome of a good writer, but no. Just no. I struggled through the books he wrote to finish The Wheel of Time, and I’ve not been able to read a single one of his own books. His writing is plebian at best and his stories boring.)

Years ago, I read in a book called The Practical Stylist by Sheridan Baker: “Clarity is the first aim; economy the second; grace the third; dignity the fourth. Our writing should be a little strange, a little out of the ordinary, a little beautiful with words and phrases not met every day, but seeming as right and natural as grass.”

That quote seemed to me to be the definition of a good writer, and I tried to write like that. Robert Jordan does. Some of his writing is truly classic and beautiful. The substitute author does not fulfill any of those requirements, but he does write in the preferred style of today, which is lots of dialogue, short sentences, short paragraphs, quick changes of point of view, with little that is elegant or dignified or graceful, and nothing out of the ordinary.

Like all authors, Jordan has tics (overworked words and phrases), and he does at times let his world building get in the way of the story, but that doesn’t make him a bad writer, just an unedited one. (That’s what an editor is for — to scrub unwanted words and meanderings from the text. Or at least point them out. But he married his editor, and though she continued to be his editor, he wouldn’t let her change a single word. Apparently, she and his publisher let him run with his books the way he wanted because he made them a fortune. Also, come to think of it, any rewrites would put him way past deadline.)

It is interesting to me that he wrote books that appealed to preteen boys as well as old women (well, one old woman). It also amuses me how often those boys say they outgrew the books when they tried to read the books years later. And yet, here I am, still growing into the books.

I do admit, though, that my interest in the books has less to do with entertainment and more to do with deconstructing his world, finding the puzzles and clues and references to our world, seeing how he wrote what he did, and to better understand his subtleties.

My latest find changes the books for me, or changes at least one character.

In the saga, the power of the universe can only be used by women because the men’s half is tainted, which makes them go insane if they use it. Despite this, the hero uses the men’s power out of necessity. Over time he begins to hear a voice in his head — the voice of the man he’d been thousands of years before. The way Jordan wrote this voice, it seemed to be an entirely different person. The voice knew things that the hero didn’t, and the voice seemed insane and totally at odds with the hero.

I don’t know how many rereads it took for me to realize that the voice was the hero. Because of the taint, memories were slipping beyond the barrier of forgetfulness that kept people from remembering previous lives. The voice created out of madness seemed to the hero to be the source of the memories. And the reason the voice was totally at odds with the hero is that the voice carried all the emotions that the hero couldn’t allow himself to feel. For example, he had to be hard to do all that he had to do. (The poor guy was barely twenty years old, prophesied to save the entire world from the Dark One, guaranteed to go insane, fated to die during the last battle, and everyone in the world wanted to use him or torture him or imprison him.) So while he’s being hard, trying to be what he thinks he needs to be to prepare for the last battle, the voice in his head is gibbering in fear, weeping, trying to run away, and sometimes laughing madly — feeling all the emotions he can’t afford to feel. And the conflicts he so often has with the voice are a reflection of his own internal struggles, having to be what he so does not want to be.

My knowing that the voice is in fact the hero, not a separate entity, makes him even more of a tragic figure, a human dealing with almost insurmountable pressures from both within and without.

Does this sort of duality and layering make Jordan a good writer? And a good story teller? I tend to think that it does. I’d really like to think that good writing is not subjective, that there are standards to meet. Storytelling, however, is subjective. Even constant readers have genres and authors they stay away from, regardless of how good or bad the writing is.

Still, I guess, it doesn’t matter. I’ll continue to read what I read, and to eschew what does not interest me.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

 

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Skimming

March 7, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I have the terrible habit of ingesting books whole without actually reading the words. I’ve never been able to explain how I read — it’s not skimming exactly, but if I read every single word individually as if reading aloud, the meaning of what I’m reading gets lost in the words themselves. Maybe the way I read is a form of meditation. Or daydreaming without visuals. (I have aphantasia — the inability to form images in my mind.) Despite having said that, I do occasionally skim, especially scenes of violence or sections that don’t keep my interest, and considering that I have read more than 25,000 books of all genres, unless the writing is better than merely competent, most books have huge sections that don’t keep my attention. Also, when it comes to fiction, there are few plots or characters that don’t echo in my head — some because I’ve read those very books before; some because they are similar to those books.

Which is why it surprises me that the Wheel of Time saga has caught my imagination enough to allow for rereads. Though there are chunks of the middle books that I can’t bring myself to read again, or even just to skim, I find myself trying to slow down and savor the rest of Jordan’s words. (Even subtracting out the last three unreadable books written by the substitute author as well as the chunky parts of Jordan’s books, there are still approximately three million words that I do read. And if half of those are used for prosaic storytelling, there are still one and a half million of Jordan’s words to savor.) A lot of his writing is truly beautiful. The subtleties are beguiling. And there is much to puzzle out as I deconstruct Robert Jordan’s world and his writing.

Sometimes I miss little things if I get to skimming a section I remember well, until something draws me back. For example, in a passage I read today, a character noticed the hero’s guards/ guardians/ personal army outside the hero’s room quietly playing a finger game: knife, paper, stone. A little later, three of those people entered the hero’s room to deal with his latest infraction of their “honor.” As they left him, one said they’d won the right to punish him and warned him not to dishonor them again. Written out like this, it’s obvious that their game (their version of rock, scissors, paper) was to choose those three, but when these elements are separated by several pages, the association becomes so obscured I missed it in previous rereads.

Admittedly, the situation wasn’t important to the overall story, but it tickles me to find such correlations. Because of this, I’m training myself not to skim, but that will work against me in the long run — without skimming, most books are not worth my time to read.

When I was young, I often read as a way of expanding my mental horizons — a way to work out in advance how I would deal with the circumstances the characters are faced with — but that’s no longer an issue with me since most fictional situations are now either somewhere in my past or will never be in my future. A choice between love and a career? No longer applicable. What to do with an unexpected pregnancy? Definitely not applicable! Taking revenge on someone? Not something I would ever do. Save the world from the forces of evil? Only applicable if that evil appears in my own backyard and even then it’s not something I want to contemplate. (I’m wary enough of thoughts to think that thinking itself can bring down upon my head whatever it is I am thinking of.)

Without any necessity for reading myself into the story, most novels become ho-hum, especially if the writer can’t make me care for the characters. Without skimming at least a part of the book and skipping other sections completely, I’d probably never have read most of the books that I did. Not finding other books of interest to me could be why I’m caught in the spokes of the Wheel of Time.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, and since you’re probably skimming this essay anyway, I doubt it matters.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

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