Nineteen Years

A lot has happened in nineteen years.  I think it was February 4th 1994, my day of stupidity, that I tried to kill myself.  It was about a girl.  Funny how that seems so stupid, but for me at that time social relationships was the only important thing in my life.  I was trying to keep a mistake from being a total loss.  I had told a girl that I loved her a month ago and she had rejected me and told me not to talk to her and I was trying to cajole her into still being friends and February 4th was when it collapsed completely.  My mental collapse was probably due to my obsessive factor.  I first thought she was a little fat boy and that is how I dismissed her as a person of interest from my mind, always a danger for me, because it lets me relax around them and get to know them.  I have always found if I share anything with a woman and get to know them in depth, I am doomed.  I don't believe in soul-mates because I know that any woman is a potential…

Anyways, I am still alive so I must not have died.  I got help, actually I tried to get the girl to talk to me by telling her what I did and she contacted the authorities.  I got help, psychiatric help, years worth of therapy.  I have never tried again, I have gotten close; a couple summers ago I had my suicide planned out. 

One of the things that I did after that week was take some time off.  I took two weeks off school.  I went to classes, but I did not do the homework or the readings, but I did do the labs.  And I read.  I read a bunch of books that I had kicking around.  I think in my slow plodding reading of the time I read three books.  I still read slowly, but I do excel at intensive reading.

I read The Eye of the World, which was the first book in the Wheel of Time series.  It was clearly a one shot book.  I remember the story quite well, the battle at the start and the run from one side of the world to the other.  The three main characters and quite a few secondary characters, some of whom became primary characters in subsequent books.  Many of the themes in the books were established in that first book.  As I said it was a one shot, there was a beginning middle and and end.

The only problem was that it was a very successful book and the publishers waved money under Robert Jordan's nose and it turns out that the end was not the end and he had many more books to write.  The second and the third and the fourth books were very good and came out quite frequently once a year or so, but then he started to flag and the quality of the books then began to drop.  Eventually they to get bad even.  The length of time between books got wider and wider apart and the books when they did come out plodded the plot along more slowly; loose ends started breeding.  At one point he wrote a prologue that was seventy pages along that described the motivations and goals of a new antagonist, fleshing him out how he was planning to disrupt his allies' plans and further his own; a real badass, only to have him killed off in the opening pages of the first chapter.

Then it came out that Robert Jordan was ill and dying; series incomplete.  Some of us cursed his other projects, Conan the Barbarian books, but really just writing one series is really bad for one's imagination.  Then he died.  And people were upset.  Most people did not know him and were upset that the series would remain incomplete.  Then another author, who I was following, was announced as being asked by the family to finish the story: Brandon Sanderson.  

Robert Jordan died in 2007.  Brandon Sanderson started publishing the last books in 2010 and the last book hit the stores last month, January 8th, 2013.  I got my copy last weekend and I finished it yesterday.  Sanderson managed to bring the story back up to the quality that it once had and did a good job cutting off all those loose ends in the three books.  Sanderson told the world that Jordan had left over 32,000 pages of notes for the series, so the three last books were Jordan's words and ideas forged and smithed by another writer.  

Now I have other book series to live for, other things to live for in anticipation.  Maybe one day I won't need anything to live for.