Photo: Alvintrusty (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Fantasy author and lifelong Dungeons & Dragons fan Patrick Rothfuss was recently on the Barnes & Noble Podcast, chatting with B&N Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog editor Joel Cunningham about everything from the sweet parental moment he fought to keep in his new comic Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons to being a good collaborator in comics and television adaptations. He also gave a small status update on The Doors of Stone, the long-awaited third installment in his Kingkiller Chronicle epic fantasy series, and his slow but steady progress.

“Kingkiller, my work on the books, is—again, it might seem strange for people to hear—but nobody laments the lack of tangible progress more than me, in terms of the next Kingkiller book,” Rothfuss told Cunningham. “But things are moving forward, if not fast—again, I’ve never promised fast, ever since I knew what I was good at professionally. I made promises very early on in interviews where I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do these books one a year.’ But I was an idiot. I had just been published for like two months, I had no idea what I was talking about.”

He discussed how, yes, he had completed a draft of the entire Kingkiller Chronicle back in 2000 but described this early version as “a book you would not have liked, because it was just discernibly bad” and emphasized the changes that he had made to it in the nearly twenty years since then.

“But I am moving forward,” he said. “More importantly, I’m finally getting my life sorted out so that I can go back and approach my writing and my craft with the joy that I used to feel back in the day, when I was just an idiot kid playing D&D or working on my unpublishable fantasy novel.”

Speaking of moving forward, Rothfuss also briefly discussed picking up a back-burnered graphic novel project with collaborator Nate Taylor set in the Kingkiller Chronicle world, and his delight with the Kingkiller Chronicle TV series. Listen below!

And because it’s B&N, of course they asked what he’s reading. Turns out Patrick Rothfuss is a big fan of Murderbot! “It was fun, and funny, and witty, and clever,” he said of Martha Wells’ Tor.com Publishing series. “It broke my heart and I cried a ton… Honestly, I think I’ve related more to Murderbot than I have maybe any other character in my life.” He also praised Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, saying of all three Hugo-nominated works, “If you read, you should read those books, and you will be delighted.”

Patrick Rothfuss photo credit: Alvintrusty under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license