Robert Jordan

[tmcg]

A few minutes ago, I heard from another author on the phone that Robert Jordan had died.

I started copyediting his books with The Shadow Rising, in 1992. When you work on a long-running series for so many years, you develop a strangely personal relationship with the author even if you never meet face-to-face or speak over the phone, and I feel...bereaved, in a way that's hard to articulate. And frustrated, with a shake-your-fist-at-the-universe kind of anger. The Wheel of Time was the grand work of a lifetime, and he should have had the lifetime to complete it.


Making Light, with many more links in the comments

Dragonmount (server appears to be overwhelmed)

Associated Press release, via Google

The longer AP obituary via the New York Times

A mirror of his cousin Wilson's statement

The Robert Jordan Memorial Forum at TarValon.net

Comments

[akaspeedo.livejournal.com]

Oh man, his fans must be going crazy--no ending to the saga now.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking about how my mother, now in her eighties, still grieves Mervyn Peake, who died when we were six years old and left a cycle of books unfinished. She wanted so badly for him to bring Titus home. I think a lot of people will grieve this the same way. It's very sad.

[(Anonymous)]

Grieving is the word I would choose - grief twinned, actually, both for the story that I won't get to read and for Robert Jordan, that he did not live to have that last book in his hands. The second is perhaps the most unfair.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

Yes, to both sides of that grief, for me too.