Patrick Rothfuss

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.