By Brenda Waldrop

Patrick Rothfuss follows up his wildly successful first novel “The Name of the Wind” with this superb telling of “day two” in Kvothe’s story.

To say that “The Wise Man’s Fear” was one of the most superb pieces of literature I’ve had the pleasure to read in some time would be an understatement.  Every one of just under 1,000 pages is suffused with such incredible detail that the reader is instantly whisked away into Kvothe’s world of Sympathy and music, treachery and betrayal, friendship, love, and madness.  The pages practically turn themselves, and if like me you have a day job that requires your presence, you’ll find yourself suddenly realizing that sleep is overrated!

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Patrick at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, CA, at his signing/reading/Q&A session, on day four of his whirlwind signing tour. (See below for interview.)  He arrived to the small store to wild cheers from the 300+ fans who had spent the last several hours attempting to bend the laws of physics into allowing them all to fit themselves inside while also being within seeing and hearing distance of the podium set up in the middle of the store.  

Patrick outlined a few ground rules for the event, most adamant about the fact that there be NO SPOILERS.  “If you have to start a sentence with, I’m sure this isn’t a spoiler, what you’re about to say is a spoiler!” he quipped to much laughter.  Ground rules set he launched into a stream of consciousness combination of storytelling, question answering, and reading from the humor and advice columns  he used to write, that had the audience crying with the force of their laughter, and listening with rapt attention as Patrick proved that he was a deft a spoken storyteller as he is writer.

I was lucky enough to catch Patrick just before the event, and he consented to give me a quick interview. Mysterious Galaxy’s General Manager Patrick Heffernan kindly allowed us to duck into their back office and away from the crowd, and after stumbling over my last name and having to restart my recorder, (I’ve only been divorced for 6 years, so yeah maybe I was a little nervous but this was Patrick Rothfuss sitting there in front of me!), we were able to begin.    

BW- “Thank you Patrick for graciously consenting to give me some of your time before your signing.  So, a long time to get this book written.  Other than the most difficult part of getting it written, aside from the obvious length? As I recall at the Comic-Con last year you had it down to some ridiculously high number of words.”

PR- “Yeah, I had to fight to keep it under 400,000.  In terms of the most difficult, there was a lot of most difficult, but probably the most difficult thing was learning how to be a professional author, because I wrote The Name of the Wind over 14 years, as a hobby and there’s a big difference between doing that and writing under a deadline as your day job.  It’s sort of like, we all put ridiculous amounts of time into the hobbies that we love, people spend thousands of hours making like a model railroad, but they would never do that for minimum wage, you know for 40 hours a week.  Um, and so it was a huge mental adjustment. 

BW- “I can imagine.”

PR- “In terms of the book itself, the hard part was revising what amounts to like a seven year old draft, into a book that is truly, truly quality and as good as The Name of the Wind.  Ah, I wrote the first draft of this in the year 2000 and I had not worked on it very much since then, you know in bits and pieces but I’d been focusing mostly on the first book because that was the most important one.  I’d learned so much since then and the first book had changed so much since then, it was actually way harder than it would have been than if I was actually writing a whole new book.  Instead I was trying to build a house out of a different house, you know and that’s just weird.  It was so weird because parts of it were still great, and parts of it really needed to be changed, figuring out which were which, and how they all fit together, yeah it was kind of all the hardest part.”

BW- “Who was your favorite character to write?”

PR- “I’d probably at this point, have to go with Auri.  Auri is so fun  and she’s so sweet, it’s easier to like Auri because we see her a little bit, the same way it’s easier to becom infatuated with someone you only know a little bit.  You know, that girl at the coffee shop,  you know you can form an elaborite love with her that’s only based around seeing her once in a while.  It’s almost harder to love Kvothe because we see all his dirty underwear so to speak.  But yeah, Auri is a ton of fun, Eladan is a ton of fun.”

BW- “So my last question, and what everyone’s dying to know, do you think we’ll be getting book three..”

PR- “You’ll get book three, my current projected timeline is 100 years.  So, you know, if it goes well you might see it a little sooner, but that’s what I’m telling everyone to expect, 100 years.” 

BW- “Well I’m willing to wait that long and I expect a lot of other readers are too.”

PR- “The mistake I made the first time of course was that I didn’t know what I was talking about so I said, ‘oh I can do it in a year’.  Obviously I couldn’t, or I could’ve I could have written a really mediocre book and it would have been kind of sad, I would have regretted it for the rest of my life, and luckily my publisher  and my editor really backed me, really gave me the time, at tremendous inconvenience to themselves.  Betsy, I was willing to do it, I was going to just do it, do it, do it, because I promised, and Betsy convinced me not to.  For which I’m eternally grateful, and relieved when she said we are pulling the book out of production, um it will be at least a couple of years.”

BW- “Well I look forward to getting it as soon as it comes out, and I’ll let you get on to the hordes of fans waiting out there for you.  Thank you so much for giving ComicsOnline some of your time!”

Autographed Copies of The Wise Mans Fear are available at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore: http://www.mystgalaxy.com/

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