Patrick Rothfuss

“The book that I would love to have ready to give you is book 3,” Rothfuss said. “I hope you all know that.”

Book 3 will not be longer than The Wise Man’s Fear.

Will book 3 will be the last in the series?

Yes and no. Book 3 closes this arc of story. Book 3 will not be the final book set in this world. Big distinction there!

“It gives us the opportunity […] to include a couple of cool things,” he explained—to adjust the text and fix any errors or inconsistencies, as well as including at least 20 illustrations and other cool extras. Here’s what you can expect to find in the new edition, which will be released in 2017:

- an “extensive” author’s note
- appendices discussing the calendar and the currency systems
- a pronunciation guide
- at least 20 illustrations
- “a better map”

This deluxe anniversary hardcover includes:

• Brand-new author’s note
• Gorgeous, never-before-seen illustrations by artist Dan Dos Santos
• Beautifully detailed and updated world map by artist Nate Taylor
• Appendix detailing calendar system and currencies
• Pronunciation guide of names and places
• Editor’s note by Rothfuss’ Hugo Award-winning editor, Betsy Wollheim

Jussi kirjoitti: Tuulen nimen suomennos on ilmeisesti myyty loppuun, ainakin nettikirjakaupat väittävät niin. Uusi painos on mahdollisesti tulossa tammikuussa.
www.adlibris.com/fi/kirja/tuulen-nimi-9789525802047

the book will also have not just one new map of the world, but two. Both of them much more detailed, and both of them illustrated by good friend and frequent collaborator Nathan Taylor.

There’s also a bunch of supplementary appendices where I go all the way down the rabbit hole and talk in some crazy detail about things like my currency systems, worldbuilding, the commonly used calendar, and the spread of the Aturan Empire. (These are also featuring illustrations by Nate Taylor.)

The book has improved, cleaned up text. An introduction, an author’s note (by me), pronunciation guide, and several appendixes about things like the currency systems, the calendar, the Aturan Empire, etc etc.

Also? It has more than 20 illustrations from Dan Dos Santos

A beautiful, collectible new hardback edition of one of the greatest fantasy novels of the past decade.

The potential series will follow a pair of wandering performers on their adventures through the unique and startling world of Temerant, immersing audiences in a universe of unexpected heroes, mystical places and terrifying dark forces.

The TV project is an origin story that is set a generation before the events of the trilogy's first novel, The Name of the Wind.

As for the unavoidable question of when, if ever, the third book will come out, that too remains unanswerable. Rothfuss, of course, is far from the first scribe of an epic fantasy series to take longer than fans would like to finish. When I asked him if there was something about the genre itself that made the story difficult to conclude, Rothfuss shook his head. “It’s me. It’s my process. It’s my life.” “He is very hard on himself,” Bialer told me later. “He is always deconstructing and putting his books back together.”

What Rothfuss did make clear is he’d rather be working on almost anything else. Since the release of the second book in the Kingkiller Chronicles, he has published two novellas and a short story set in the same world as the trilogy. Writing them was like eating “cupcakes,” while working on the third book is like sitting down to “a plate of carrots.”

“I want to write stories in this world forever,” Rothfuss said. “At the end of Lord of the Rings, the world is used up by the story. And so, there’s actually a little clue in there, when Kvothe’s dad was talking about the story of Lanre, he says, ‘Sit and listen, for I will tell a story, the story of a man.’ And that’s what this is. This is one person’s story. And he’s an interesting person and he has interesting events in his life. But at the end of that he won’t be like ‘Welp, I know everything there is to know about this world.’ No, man, you don’t know anything about this world yet. You have so many little corners. There’s a lot. There’s a lot about this world I have not managed to bring in and I want to tell stories there forever.

Rothfuss was asked by an Alaskan fan, “Are you like a DM [Dungeon Master] taking us on a journey where the bard is the hero of the story?” The bard is an often underappreciated class in Dungeons & Dragons, and the questioner wondered (in light of Rothfuss’ well-known affection for the game) whether his trilogy is a conscious attempt to ennoble the D&D bard archetype with Kvothe, hero of The Kingkiller Chronicle and virtuoso lute player.

“It’s way worse than that,” Rothfuss answered. “I am an author who has tricked you into reading a trilogy that is a million-word prologue.”

But positioning The Kingkiller Chronicle as prologue puts this in a new light. Rather than hop around, writing stories in far-flung corners and various time periods in his fictional world, Rothfuss seems to see Book 3 as queuing up an even grander narrative, suggesting that Kvothe, rather than providing an end to continent-altering events, will instead set a new, larger conflict in motion.

Rothfuss’ description of The Kingkiller Chronicle as prologue suggests that maybe Kvothe won’t fix the world. Instead, the forces he has unleashed will be a problem for future adventurers, as if The Kingkiller Chronicle was all just an origin story for some Sauron-level threat, as yet unseen.

While Rothfuss hasn’t announced any specific plans for after the release of The Kingkiller Chronicle Book 3, whenever that may be, he did pitch a book of sorts to Emerald City Comic Con attendees. In The Wise Man’s Fear, Kvothe trains with the sword masters of the Adem, known in the larger world as deadly mercenaries. They are guided by a philosophy known as The Lethani.

“The Ademre have their, I don’t want to call it their sacred text, but they do have their nine and 90 tales, the stories that all Ademre know and illustrate certain things about their lives. I’ve thought of writing that book, that series of very small, almost parables or zen koans, but I have a lot of irons in the fire and I don’t know how interested people would be in a series of esoteric stories based in a tertiary part of my fantasy world,” Rothfuss said, to cheers of support from the audience. “It probably will happen eventually."

“Kingkiller, my work on the books, is—again, it might seem strange for people to hear—but nobody laments the lack of tangible progress more than me, in terms of the next Kingkiller book,” Rothfuss told Cunningham. “But things are moving forward, if not fast—again, I’ve never promised fast, ever since I knew what I was good at professionally. I made promises very early on in interviews where I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do these books one a year.’ But I was an idiot. I had just been published for like two months, I had no idea what I was talking about.”

He discussed how, yes, he had completed a draft of the entire Kingkiller Chronicle back in 2000 but described this early version as “a book you would not have liked, because it was just discernibly bad” and emphasized the changes that he had made to it in the nearly twenty years since then.

“But I am moving forward,” he said. “More importantly, I’m finally getting my life sorted out so that I can go back and approach my writing and my craft with the joy that I used to feel back in the day, when I was just an idiot kid playing D&D or working on my unpublishable fantasy novel.”

Speaking of moving forward, Rothfuss also briefly discussed picking up a back-burnered graphic novel project with collaborator Nate Taylor set in the Kingkiller Chronicle world, and his delight with the Kingkiller Chronicle TV series.

Jussi kirjoitti: Viime viikolla uutisoitiin, että Kuninkaansurmaajan kronikka -tv-sarja kertoo tapahtumista yhtä sukupolvea ennen kirjojen tapahtumia. Sarja nähdään Showtime-kanavalla.

Will there be a 10th anniversary WMF?

Probably sure. Probably yes. I imagine.

On the other hand there’s my professional life. There have been big things there too, many of them centering around the development deal with Lionsgate, and the show I was working on with John Rodgers for Showtime. Those things have been a big part of my life for years, taking up a ton of time, energy, and headspace. (Hell, just negotiating the contract with Lionsgate took me nearly 18 months.)

Was it interesting? Absolutely. New? Terrifyingly so. Were there stories to tell? Very yes.

So now, Book 3, originally what was the third part of this huge story…a lot of it was written in ’98, y’know, so long ago, I was not as good a writer. And even the parts of it that are good writing didn’t match up with the parts of the book I had changed to make the story function better.

- We'll learn more about Denna's past.​- He wants to write novellas for Elodin and Devi.- He'd like to write another Auri novella but it's he doesn't know if there's enough story there.

- Writing DoS is fun, pressure is not. Analogy: you have a significant other who is really all-around awesome, but your five million parents are constantly asking when they'll get grandkids.
- Pat's excited about more Fae in Doors of Stone, "that's good shit".
- Tension in the frame story will not be fully resolved at the end of Doors of Stone.
- Pat's in a better place mentally than he has been, which carries over to writing.

Question: “Is there a danger of Book 3 becoming too large for one volume?”
Answer: “No.”

Question: “Has the ending changed?”
Answer: “No.”

“Yes, there is going to be a book four,”  Rothfuss said. “In a perfect world, I wanna write all sorts of stories in this world. I want to write more, everybody. I want to write more and I want to publish more. Those two things aren’t necessarily…connected but they are correlated. I’m happier when I write and I feel better when I’m publishing because I know that y’all want books from me and you all like living in that world. I like living in that world. I miss being able to be in it.”

“Y’know, we do learn how Bast and Kvothe meet,” Rothfuss said. “And actually that has been something that I’ve really had to expand. Ages ago when I wrote the initial draft of [The Kingkiller Chronicle]…Bast was not such a developed character. And Kvothe and Bast’s relationship had not developed to the degree that it currently is. There’s sort of, what I think of in my head as the ‘buddy-cop thing,’ where they meet and that’s fine…but what you don’t see is like, how did they go from these people who met…to where they are now.”

I skipped over…some of how they got to where like, it makes sense them being who they are to each other now, in the frame story. And that was very abrupt. It wasn’t abrupt initially, because again in the first draft…that relationship was not as developed. But over the course of three, four hundred revisions, Bast and Kvothe and how they interacted in the frame story became like…really good. So now I have to make sure that the beginning really blends well into the end

Hector Navarro: Patrick, what's the status on the third book?

Pat (jokingly): "What a courteously phrased yet unexpected question."

The truth is...and this is the truth, and anyone who follows me on Twitch or social media or whatever has heard me say it...no-one would be happier, except maybe my publisher, to have the third book out. And there's a bunch of reasons why it isn't.

"The big two, really, without getting into a lot of granular detail, [are] I'm fairly obsessive. You know, I wrote this entire...I started writing in my head what I always thought of as 'The Book'. I started it back in '94. And then I worked on it for seven years, until I got to, like, the end of the story, because until you get to the end of a story, you kinda can't meaningfully rework it. And I knew it was way too long to be a book, but still in my head it was the book, so in the year 2000-ish, I finished that draft, that first draft, effectively, and then for the next seven years, I'm like, 'Well, too big, what about there?'"

He does a chopping motion and indicates size with his hand. "'Now that's about a book's worth!'

"But that doesn't work, folks. You can't just be like, 'Here's a story," he says, and begins measuring out where the book is divided into parts, stopping at the first third. "And book. You gotta do a thing to the end, so it's like the end of a thing, and then do something to the whole of it, so it's, like, a book. And that took another seven years. And then I failed to sell it and all of that stuff."

But the amount of rewriting that happened in The Name of the Wind was immense. Then I went into book two to work on it, so much had changed, then I had to...there you have no beginning and no end, 'cause it's the middle bit, so I had to rework that extensively. I had to deal with characters that I had added or removed, entire plot lines that I had changed. So then I changed that way more even than I had changed The Name of the Wind, and then I'm left with this, this end bit," he says, indicating the chunk that is The Doors of Stone. "And I had to sort of build a house out of a house that was not a very good house, and also that was like ten years ago.

"So there's just a lot. I only get to do this once. We all saw the third Matrix movie. And you know I could effectively travel backwards in time and ruin this thing that so many have enjoyed, so I'm obsessing about that."

Later he says, "I wish to hell I could have already given you book three a long time ago, and by 'you' I mean everyone out there. And I'm sorry.

"He also talks a bit later about figuring out healthier ways of dealing with toxic aspects of the fandom, where people attacking the book not being there fast enough or giving the book 1-star reviews used to bother him, and now he's over it—he's burned his "surplus give a shit" in a "healthy way" where he's able to care about the book but ignore people who love the series but yell at him for not releasing it fast enough. He talks a bit about how much he wants to get it right, and how things in his personal life took a bad turn, and how he's come a long way but is still putting things (his life and book) back together.

Will we get a 10th Anniversary of Wise Man's Fear?
Yes. Pandemic just messed it up.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to get it done early next year. February at the latest.