Making a Mess with the Papers Vol. 5

Karen Ahlstrom here. I’m the Continuity Director at Dragonsteel, making sure Brandon doesn’t contradict anything he’s said in the past million or so pages.

You’ve just seen, or about to see, volume 5 of the “Making a Mess with the Papers” videos. There are some fans who have been asking when we’re going to post one for this book, but most of you probably don’t know what’s going on. TL;DR: our daughter did something cute when she was two, and it became a tradition.

To understand why those particular papers were on the stairs for our daughter to make a mess with, we need to flashback to 2010. Brandon was in the middle of writing the final Wheel of Time books and knew that this moment in time was his best opportunity to launch an epic series of his own. Robert Jordan fans who had read The Gathering Storm might give this new author’s books a chance while they waited for Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light to come out.

When he was chosen to complete the Wheel of Time books, one of his author friends convinced him that now that he was so busy, he really needed to hire an assistant. His old college friend (and my husband), Peter Ahlstrom, was looking for work as an editor, so the timing was perfect. We moved our little family from California to Utah, though with only a part-time job we didn’t have enough money to rent an apartment. We lived in my parents’ house, and Peter’s office was in the basement of Brandon and Emily’s house, a 40-minute drive away.

Stormlight books are BIG, and in order to take advantage of the gap between Wheel of Time books, Peter had to work long hours to turn in The Way of Kings before the deadline. Part time work quickly turned into full time, and then overtime. So it was that Peter started bringing the book home to proofread after dinner, sitting in the horrible sagging old foam chair that was his only workspace.

I’m getting to the important part. Really I am.

One day, coming home from work, he set the stack of book pages down on the banister, meaning to carry it downstairs later. Not long after that, we heard a strange noise from the hallway. Upon investigation, we found that our precious toddler had knocked it over. The whole thousand-page manuscript was scattered all over the stairs, with the two-year-old gleefully throwing them around.

There comes a time as a parent when you have to decide whether the mess your kid made is something to get angry about, or if it’s something you’ll look back on and laugh. We decided that this was one of the latter, so Peter pulled out his phone and started filming.

“What are you doing?” we asked her.

She had not yet learned how to lie or make excuses, so in her precious little voice she said, simply and honestly, “I’m making a mess with the papers.”

Go watch video 1 if you haven’t yet. Here’s the link. I’ll wait. Isn’t she adorable?

So now we flash forward to late 2013. Another Stormlight book. Another deadline. More long hours. Peter got sick and literally worked himself into the hospital. When he finished, we were all so done with this book that we needed to do something to celebrate. We remembered the papers video, and decided to recreate it with the manuscript of Words of Radiance. L, now five years old, obligingly tossed the printout down the stairs, then turned upside down and said her lines, giggling all the time.

In 2017, when Oathbringer was done, we decided that Peter deserved recognition for his diligent and exhausting work on the book, so I went to the thrift store and bought the biggest and gaudiest bright green trophy they had and the girls paraded through the living room singing Pomp and Circumstance before presenting it to him. After that, we just had to do the ceremonial tossing of the papers. L heaved up the stack (this one was more than 1200 pages long and nearly too heavy for her to lift) and dumped it in a heap that went cascading down the kitchen stairs to land on her sisters who were watching from below.

2020, of course, was a year when everyone was stressed about everything. Peter was sharing my home office, which meant that there was no place in the house that I could go to be alone. The constant simultaneous isolation and crowding wore on all of us. I was miraculously able to finish my work on the book, but only by fighting through panic attacks whenever I found an error. And there were a lot of errors to find and fix before the book went to press.

We needed to do something extra special to celebrate turning it in, so we all put on our masks and headed over to Cosmere House where the stairs were more open and the event could be seen in all its glory. Adam (VP of Marketing and Publicity at Dragonsteel) strapped a Go Pro camera to L’s chest, set up extra cameras to film from different angles and sent her up to the top of the steps. The results were edited into an epic video with dramatic music and a slow motion shot of her kicking the last page to flutter down with the rest of them.

Last month, in our interdepartmental meeting, we told Jeremy (Director of Marketing at Dragonsteel)—who had not seen the previous videos—that Peter had an idea for the YouTube channel. Jeremy, always hungry for content, leaned forward. As we described the making a mess with the papers tradition, his eyes got bigger and bigger. “That was not where I was expecting this conversation to go,” he said. Still, he was excited about the idea, and thrilled to hear that the final proofread was finished (Peter was working every waking hour for weeks and weeks. We really need to set more realistic schedules for these books), and that we were ready to make the video anytime.

I don’t know what Jeremy has planned for this year’s video, but I’m sure it’ll be great. Be sure to tune in a few years from now when we start into the Stormlight back five for volume 6 of the continuing saga of making a mess with the papers!