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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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.

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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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Deciding Not to Decide

March 6, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I seldom get past the first chapter of new books anymore. Too many authors eschew the traditional past tense, third-person limited point of view and write in the clunky present tense first person point of view. (Or a mixed bag, which is even worse) Too many try to write in a roundabout style rather than beginning at the beginning and continuing until the end. Then there is a weird undercurrent of . . . nastiness, perhaps, or maybe just uneasiness to most books nowadays. I don’t know if it has to do with the difference in young authors today (and “young” to me includes those who are in their middle years), with the difference in mores, with too much artificial intelligence help, with the difference in the new generation of acquisition editors. Or if it’s just me with my now outdated values. But whatever the reason, I haven’t enjoyed any book written after 2022. And not a lot before then, either.

Because of this, I no longer feel like looking for books at the library. I figure I’d perused those same shelves over 700 times since I’ve been here, and I just couldn’t search them anymore. Too many shelves are full of whole series of books I have no intention of reading —- the entire Patterson oeuvre, all of Stuart Woods’ books, all the popular romance authors, and dozens of others. Too many other shelves are full of books I’ve read or reread.

So I stopped going to the library. I never made the decision not to go, I simply didn’t go, which is weird.

Visiting the library had been a major part of my outside activities ever since I got here to this town. It was such a treat because there hadn’t been a library near where I lived in California, so I went years without reading much. (That doesn’t seem right. Maybe I bought books. I know I bought word puzzles magazines, wrote books, and went through the video tapes Jeff had collected, but it seems odd to think of not be as caught up in reading as I’d always been.)

I’ll finish this current reread of The Wheel of Time, reread the other few books I’ve collected, read the alchemy books inherited from my older brother, maybe read the books I wrote, and then . . . I don’t know. I’ll figure out something to do. I’ll have to — I’ve stopped going online except to blog or play a game for a little while because I simply don’t want to know what is going on anymore. Which leaves me a lot of free time!

It’s funny how different this year is. I used to agonize over any decision, and yet suddenly, here I am — blogging without ever having decided to blog daily, not going to the library without ever having decided to stop, staying away from news without ever having decided to do so. (Staying away from news was my New Year’s resolution, which lasted all of two weeks, and yet now, two months later, I’ve started honoring the resolution again.) Come to think of it, I never decided to do this current reread of The Wheel of Time either. I just did it.

This is a good time to make changes — with spring coming, I’ll be spending more time outside, and with nothing calling me back inside, maybe I’ll enjoy the work this year. (I didn’t last year. It just seemed to be too much trouble.)

Makes me wonder what other things I will start (or stop) doing without ever making a conscious decision. Should be interesting to see what life deals out.

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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 Reflection of the Worlds

February 27, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The so-called real world and the imaginary world of the Wheel of Time are becoming intertwoven in my mind, so that I often see each in the other. More importantly, for the sake of this discussion, I’m beginning to see what is happening in our world as a reflection of the Wheel of Time.

I just watched a news reel where the commentator postulated that Trump and MAGA weren’t an accident but were a necessary response to the rapid political shift in the past decade on issues like immigration, crime, education, and national identity. He said that many voters felt as if the country was changing without them, ignoring what they believed in. Trump brought back into focus their basic ideals of secure borders, law enforcement, industry, and national unity.

The commentator further postulated that this mattered from a global perspective since nations competing in the world market need both unity and public trust. When a significant number of voters feel underrepresented, national strength declines and now, as much as ever, we need that strength. As the commentator said, “That’s why Trump functioned less as an anomaly — and more as a political correction. Not just politics. A system adjustment.”

This post isn’t about whether you or I agree with his comments. It’s not even about Trump or MAGA. It’s about the words “response” and “corrective” and “adjustment” and the chord they struck with me because of how they reflect the Wheel of Time.

In the Wheel of Time, there is a phenomenon called ta’verern, which is a necessary response to shifts in the Pattern. The Wheel of Time weaves the Pattern of the Ages, and the threads it uses are lives. When the weave drifts too far from the pattern, it chooses a ta’verern to make adjustments, to correct the weave. Though these people might choose to be leaders, they can’t choose to be ta’verern. The pattern chooses them, and for a while, regardless of what they want, all surrounding threads are forced to swirl around them, like a leaf in a whirlpool. In the case of the Wheel of Time, people hate the ta’verern, fear him, misunderstand him, conspire against him, try to kill him. Some follow him; some even see the truth of what he is trying to do. But love or hate him, he changes all their lives just by being ta’verern. Just by being.

I’m not saying Trump is ta’verern. Of course, I’m not saying he isn’t, either. Still, whether hated or loved, plotted against or followed, he does seem to be a focal point for much that is happening in the world today.

You might not find this reflection of the Wheel of Time amusing, but 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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Daily Blogging

February 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram

For years, I blogged every day mostly as a discipline to give form to my days and because I knew that if I ever stopped, I might just let the practice slide away. And the practice did. Slide away, I mean. In January 2023, I still posted every day, and I continued until the middle of February. After that, I posted only sporadically, maybe 25 posts the rest of that year, 7 the following year, and 14 last year. Not very impressive, but then, it wasn’t supposed to be. I simply had nothing to say that I wanted to make public. I’d gradually become sensitive about putting my thoughts out there for anyone to read, so unless I had something innocuous to post, such as pictures of my garden, I kept my thoughts to myself.

Which makes me wonder why all of a sudden this year I’ve found myself blogging again. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I just posted on the first of January, then the second, then . . .

Now here I am, day 53 of daily blogging, though I have no idea why. Can’t even begin to guess. Not that the reason matters. What matters, I suppose, is that I am sitting at my computer. Digging words out of my sluggish brain. Trying to make sense of the world at large.

I originally wrote, “the world around me” and only substituted “the world at large” when I realized that world around me makes sense. I look out the window, and I see that the sky is blue, the grass a dry winter green, the streets empty. I hear clucking from chickens a couple of houses away, tapping now and again from the roofers halfway down the block, and a train in the distance. But it’s mostly quiet. Peaceful. When I close my computer, the only tensions I feel are from the book I’m reading, and most of those come because I’m not engaged in the story at all. (I thought I should get away from the Wheel of Time for a while, but going from the study of a multi-layered epic to reading a simple one-note novel, makes that novel feel even flatter than it really is.)

But this isn’t a post about reading. It’s about writing, finding words in my own head rather than in someone else’s, even if the words I find don’t mean a whole lot. It’s about being able to see something to appreciate in my small life and being able to express my feelings. It’s about being centered on what truly matters to me right now rather than worrying so much about things happening elsewhere that I have no control over.

What I do have control over are my words, and I that, I imagine, more than anything, is what makes this current practice of blogging every day important to me. Though to tell the truth, I’m still not sure I want to make my thoughts public. Luckily for me, my tulips are making themselves known, telling me that gardening season is coming, and soon we can both contemplate something more interesting — watching my garden grow.

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

Posted in blogging, books, internet, life. Tags: , , , , . 8 Comments »

Conspiracy Theories Coming True

February 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I came across a quote the other day: “I need new conspiracy theories. All my old ones are coming true.” I had to laugh because it sure seems to be right on.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I discovered the book, The Annotated Alice, which decoded the puzzles, wordplay and obscure Victorian references in both The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Around the same time, I discovered The Annotated Mother Goose, which gave the hidden truths behind familiar nursery rhymes. It astonished and delighted me to discover that there were secrets not commonly known to everyone, and that led me to a lifetime of trying to discover more secrets hidden in books.

My first discoveries were rather unimportant in the long run, such as the idea that the continents were all one land mass. At the time I found this theory, it was still controversial and ridiculed by scientists. Years later, in a science book I was reading, I came across the same idea, though by then, it was not a theory but an accepted fact. Shocked me, for sure! That, I think was my first acquaintance with a so-called “conspiracy theory” coming true.

As I discovered, there were — and are — many conspiracies in the world that form our lives. These aren’t theories so much as things “important” people do and enact without our knowledge. Sometimes the acts are benign, sometimes not. To keep the non-benign conspiracies from coming to light, people who find hints of these conspiracies are called “conspiracy theorists,” which is — in the minds of the conspirators — a way of diminishing the conspiracy hunters.

During research on such behind-the-scenes machinations, I saw the phrase “The New World Order” — the idea that an elite group was trying to steer the world toward a one-world economy, ideology, and ultimately government. Those words have been around for centuries (I came across the phrase in financial histories of the 1600s when the first central bank was established), but it was always a hush-hush idea, one that was consistently denigrated and denied. Denied, that is, until George W. Bush actually used the phrase in a speech. Shocked the heck out of me because I wasn’t sure I believed anything I’d read about that theory, but still, it was another example of a “conspiracy theory” coming true. (Despite Bush’s use of the phrase, “new world order” still seems to have connotations of conspiracy theory, though the term “world order” is commonly used now, which should tell us something.)

Sometimes those conspiracy writers are not at all the fringe lunatics they are portrayed to be. In fact, Antony C. Sutton, one of the first in modern times (if the 1970s are still considered modern times rather than ancient history) to write about those secret machinations was a graduate of the University of London, a well-respected economist, an Assistant Professor of Economics at California State College, and later a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, at Stanford University. Some people think his books about the international corporate elites that were behind much of the events of the cold war were well researched, but scholars never went for the books because they didn’t believe his idea of a global plot by a rich few; to them, it seemed his books were geared too much to the conspiracy crowd. And yet, here we are today, with words like “globalism,” “global elite,” and “the agenda of the liberal globalists” being bandied about as if they were sweets for the children. Shocking, but another conspiracy theory coming real.

It’s no secret anymore that world players have probably always used the world as their playground, but there are still some things that mystify me, such as the following:

In a single decade, 1861 to 1871, the United States fought the Civil War, the serfs were emancipated in Russia, Italy was unified, Canada was unified, the German Empire was proclaimed, the Austria-Hungary Dual Monarchy was established, Thailand was reorganized, the Meiji Restoration in Japan gave power to a western oligarchy, and Das Kapital, a philosophy for the New World Order, was published. It seems too much of a coincidence that global movements of such magnitude would rise independently of one another. Did someone, or a group of someones, rebuild Europe along with large chunks of the rest of the world? Could there be some sort of elite group that’s above even the globalists of today, someone or some assembly that they get their orders from? Now I’m being silly. Or am I?

With all the conspiracy theories coming true, why not this one, too.

 

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

 

Posted in books, life, history/myth. Tags: , , , , , , , . 5 Comments »

My Every Day

February 5, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
View all responses

My most ideal day? Well, that’s simple enough to describe — it’s pretty much my every day so far this year:

Get up. Do stretching exercises. Make the bed. Have a cup of tea. Play a bit of a hidden object game. Write a blog post. Read. Have breakfast. Read. Have lunch. Read. Take a short walk. Read. Rest a bit. Read. Have a quick snack. Read. Check online to see what if anything is going on with my blog. Read. Read some more until it’s time to go to bed, then read until lights out.

Well, that’s my every day except for the walk. I keep trying to get back into walking every day, but I can’t seem to always find the energy. Of course, in an ideal day, I’d have plenty of energy, no sinus issues, and the get up and go to just get up and go. Sometimes, of course, my ideal day involves a visit with a friend or neighbor or whoever else I might encounter during the walk, but apparently not today.

I used to play the hidden object game a lot more until much of that online time got supplanted by blogging. Odd how that happened. I never actually decided to start posting every day as I used to. I just . . . did.

I must admit, blogging does help make my day an ideal one. It feels like coming home, in a way, a comfortable way to spend time, a pleasant way to communicate without having people cut me off while I am speaking if they disagree. (You might cut me off and stop reading, but since I’d never know, it’s not hurtful.) It also gives me something to think about other than the state of the world and the lack of common sense (though why something that’s in such short supply is called “common,” I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, apparently, since this is a sentiment I encounter so often that it’s embarrassingly trite). Best of all, blogging allows me to play with words, like above when I wrote “the get up and go to just get up and go.” I tend to be too serious, so word play lets me indulge my fantasy that I’m witty and charming and lighthearted. (And no, that fantasy is not part of my ideal day since ideally, I need to be what I am, whatever that might be.)

Well, this part of my ideal day has been fulfilled. Now on the next part: Reading!!

(I couldn’t find a photo of myself reading, so here is the next best thing: my 97-year-old father reading one of my books during his last days.)

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

Posted in blogging, books, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »
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