Over the next few months and years, Hatboy’s Hatstand will experience a … reborn … interest in Robert Jordan‘s Wheel of Time series.

This is because Amazon Prime Video is getting closer and closer to actually bringing the series to the small screen in the form of a television series of, ooh, some sort. And it’s very exciting.

The Wheel of Time could be said, as most of you know already, to be the defining book series of my young-adult to middle-aged-manchild life. So many of my posts and stories reflect it in some way, and of course a huge part of my online and offline life are interwoven with it to such an extent that it has formed part of my discourse framework. It’s really impossible to overstate how much of an impact this vast, silly tale had on my existence. So of course, now it seems set to become a TV series at least attempting to rival Game of Thrones, I’m going to be talking about it.

Since I’m also focussing on my works in progress, however, I figured I would do something a bit lazy and cheeky, and just start reposting an old and quite huge work of satire I once undertook: C&J Jordan’s The Steal of Time. This was a parody of the Wheel of Time series, as the name might suggest, and I got as far as Winter’s Heart before running out of steam.

The main premise was that a bunch of Internet nerds were transported into the Wheel of Time universe as part of some kind of secret experiment by Tor Publishing. The characters, then, are exaggerated versions of the real Internet nerds I knew and loved in the late ’90s, interacting with my own interpretations of the Wheel of Time characters. In short, it’s a Wheel of Time fanfic from before we really knew that fanfic was a thing.

Taking people I know and turning them into characters in my stories is, you may now be realising, not a new thing. But I think I’ve gotten better at it. I will be posting up the story with as few changes as possible, so I’m going to apologise in advance for the poor writing. I hope the overall tale stands up to the years – indeed, the decades – separating it from its context.

I will also take breaks to post up my promised character studies and story segments. Let’s see how this goes.