Robert Jordan diagnosed with blood disease

[Lenthan]

I'm going to sound like a shill, and I am, just not paid for it.

It's excellent, but so far only three books. WoT and Ice and Fire didn't start suffering bloat and padding until the fourth book.

Actually 6 books have been released with 3 novella. However, only 3 have been released in the US. You can get the other books from amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk or http://www.clarkesworldbooks.com/.

Here's the titles:

Novels:
1. Gardens of the Moon
2. Deadhouse Gates
3. Memories of Ice
4. House of Chains
5. Midnight Tides
6. The Bonehunters
7. Reaper's Gale
8. Toll the Hounds
9. Dust of Dreams
10. The Crippled God

Novella:
1. Blood Follows: A Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach
2. The Healthy Dead: A Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach

1: Night of Knives by Ian Cameron Esslemont

www.malazanempire.com is a work in progress site, but it's the best one I've found.

Think I'll make a big post about it in a new thread.

[Angry Amadeus]

Well, for the most part I agree.

Jordan (is to) Tea-Sipping Ninnies In Pissing Contests

as

Martin (is to) Depictions of Horrible Dreams to Lead Off Every Fucking Chapter

Le capiche?

[Surlok TP]

My treatment starts in about 2 weeks at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where they have seen and treated more cases like mine than anywhere else in the US. Basically, it boils down to this. They will harvest a good quantity of my bone marrow stem cells from my blood. These aren't the stem cells that have Bush and Cheney in a swivet; they can only grow into bone marrow, and only into my bone marrow at that. Then will follow two days of intense chemotherapy to kill off all of my bone marrow, since there is no way at present to target just the misbehaving 5%. Once this is done, they will re-implant my bmsc to begin rebuilding my bone marrow and immune system, which will of course go south with the bone marrow. Depending on how long it takes me to recuperate sufficiently, 6 to 8 weeks after checking in, I can come home. I will have a fifty-fifty chance of some good result (25% chance of remission; 25% chance of some reduction in amyloid production), a 35-40% chance of no result, and a 10-15% chance of fatality. Believe me, that's a Hell of a lot better than staring down the barrel of a one-year median. If I get less than full remission, my doctor already, she says, has several therapies in mind, though I suspect we will heading into experimental territory. If that is where this takes me, however, so be it. I have thirty more years worth of books to write even if I can keep from thinking of any more, and I don't intend to let this thing get in my way.

Just to give an idea of what this is like, although keeping in mind this is from experience 20 years ago and as a 7 year old child , The whole process is pretty insane....

I am a little hazy on the Stem Cell bit,I guess the blood disease is already in his marrow, which makes sense I suppose.Not familiar with the technique of harvesting these rather than actual bone marrow itself. Mine was due to cancer so; Upon Diagnosis they did a scrape on my marrow, which involved digging into my hip from my back and literally scraping it. They performed this on me awake, with nothing but the skin frozen since they couldn't freeze anything else for whatever reason. I was strapped to the bed face down with my dad andseveral doctors holding me while I screamed in agony as they scrapped at my bone...

Moving along, Once discovered that the cancer had not yet made it into my marrow they did a bone marrow extraction. This I was knocked out for. The procedure involves shoving enormous syringes into your hips ,4-5 punctures per hip per side of body EI front left, back left etc , resulting in 15-20 holes. These are again,large needles, so you are scarred for life on your hips.Then they freeze it. If the scrape result comes back positive for cancer cells then they need to find a donor. Thats how it was in '86, how it is now I don't know, again I have never heard of harvesting stem cells...

Anyhow the recovery from that is insane and firstly results in no use of your legs for a few days...But that is irrelevant.

Then on to the cleansing of your body assuming your Marrow needs to be transplanted.Chemo itself wreaks havoc on your body,but at the same time they can control it somewhat via other drugs. In the case of your immune system they only adminster chemo on days or during times your white blood cells are doing well. This is under normal chemo therapy , which I had for nearly 2 years ( I had a rare and particularly lethal form of lymphoma). When you need to cleanse your marrow of disease however they need to basically nuke your system with Chemo. The main side effect of this is basically no immune system at all, this is the same issue that Aids victims eventually have. With no immune system most drugs won't work or cannot be administered do to threat of death. Any illness , even a common cold, is not "potentially" lethal , it is most definatenly lethal, which is where the 10-15% chance of Fatality comes from. You are basically locked into a sterile room where you spend the next 4-8 weeks. No one can come in without being extensively cleansed first,this is a doctor or nurse and no one else for no reason what so ever. No books ,toys etc ,nothing that could carry any sort of germ. You are bascially a shell because your body is all but dead , it is exhausted full time trying to regenerate itself. You watch TV operated VIA remote by someone outside.

It sucks ass.

Then you get out and it's a 50/50 60/40 etc etc chance that the bad shit is still there,or gone or simply hiding. It's a lot of hope or faith I suppose if you are religious and you get alot of time ,alone to think about all that.

So if nothing else he'll have alot of time on his hands un-bothered to think about the direction of his books.I suppose he could even dicate and have some write for him while he is in there.

This is assuming also that they do it similiary today as they did when I went through it all I imagine it should be fairly close....

[Ameraves Loyalheart]

I read a statement from Jordan a couple months ago, and for the life of me I can't find it no matter how hard I look. What he stated was that the series will be wrapping up in hopefully 1, at the most 2 more books. However, he wants to finish the 2 other pre-quels as well. So we can hold our breath and hope for a minimum of 3 more books, but I am going to guess 4. Of course as has been stated with his slow pace of putting out books, that could be upwards of 10 years. Although 'A New Spring' was pretty short, so maybe the others will be as well.

I started reading the WOT series when the 7th book was just published. So for me I got to read all 7 right in a row, and that is really where it took a turn to slow down. Books 8-10 were horrible, with the ending of 10 being the only thing I can even recall from those books. 11 was atleast decent in that you can see things finally starting to get tied up so the series can be finished.

Here is to hoping he recovers, and not just so he can finish the books.

[Daladmer]

Does this mean Jordan will finally start to wrap up WoT?

[Coren]

Robert Jordan's quote about the next book being the last -

"There will be one more book. If it's 1500+ pages, comes with it's own luggage cart and Tor has to invent a new binding process, there will be one more book."

It's also slated to be titled "Memories of Light" or something like that.