The Glade 4.0

There's nothing wrong with extended series. Let me just start off with saying that. While the trilogy is a staple, it's certainly understandable that authors could want to write anything from a standalone to whatever Xanth has gotten up to. And while I joke about Xanth, it's not really in the same situation. It could have been over at any time. Much the same as Terry Pratchett could just stop writing Discworld novels because he can't remember what he's writing anymore. They have a common setting, but there's no overarching storyline that anybody needs a climax to. When you give an author carte blanche to keep writing until they die, then this is the situation you get. They die, and now there's some hard feelings. Anybody could get hit by a bus, sure. Maybe Sanderson gets halfway through his new series and crashes his Cessna into the side of Mt. Hood. (aside - I'm just making that up) Stuff happens. But when you know a guy is on the downward spiral, maybe you don't try to milk him for everything he's got left, and maybe you tell him to wrap it up and knock off the 300 pages of affronted sniffing, braid tugging, and dress straightening.

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Only problem with that is that the last book Jordan released was Knife of Dreams, which was well edited, and moved the plot forward a ton. He was diagnosed with amyliodosis a couple months after the book was released. He died 2 years later.

There simply was no time to "wrap it up". Not without totally abandoning major plotlines, and creating a complete mess of a novel that would have pleased no one.

There were definitely some issues with books 7 through 10 (A Crown of Swords - Crossroads of Twilight). There were some great moments in those books, but they didn't always move the plot forward fast enough. But I enjoyed all of those books, with the exception of Crossroads of Twilight. For that book nothing of importance happens outside of the last chapter. Just read Leigh's reread of CoT over on tor.com and skip ahead to Knife of Dreams.

My point is that once you got to where we were after CoT, there really was no way to wrap it up in under 4 books. The last 3 books have moved the plot along at an extremely fast pace.

He didn't report the diagnosis until 2006, but his health was in doubt well before then. I can remember when the slowdown happened, between Lord of Chaos and A Crown of Swords, health was cited as the reason. And that would have been '96/'97-ish.

That being said, I don't recall Knife of Dreams being any better edited than the previous 10 books (11 if you count A New Spring). Editing is what allowed the series to spiral out of control to where one more book probably wasn't going to do it.

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It's been so long since I read the earlier books. I was probably a teenager... I used to like all kinds of stupid ****. Sometimes you can't go back home, ya know?

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ok, this is where your argument is really slipping. There were like 5 or 6 major plot arcs that got resolved in KoD. It went quite a ways towards wrapping up the series. I already agreed that the series spread out too far earlier. It should have been driving towards a conclusion after the Lord of Chaos, instead it spread further out. CoT was the worst, as it didn't resolve anything, or move any plot point forward significantly. So when you say that KoD was not "any better edited than the previous..." it makes me question what the hell you are talking about.

And I've never heard of any illness being behind a delay between Lord of Chaos and A Crown of Swords, but I hadn't got into the series yet. But there was less than two years between the publication of the two books (18 months) so it couldn't have been much of a delay. And are you really saying that he had amyloidosis (a disease with a median life expectancy of less than four years) back in '96? There was no evidence of him being chronically ill, or on "a downward spiral" prior to him being diagnosed with amyloidosis.