Me, I put my money on thirteen, because that number crops up again and again and again during the series. :-)
But I disagree with the theory on one simple basis, which is that if that's true, then Jordan lied repeatedly to people, including his own editor. It's well-known that he kept giving different estimates of the series' length (I'm 95% certain it was originally sold as a trilogy), but he definitely didn't start out saying it would be twelve. Did he eventually fixate on that number? I can believe it; certainly by CoT he was swearing blind it would be two more books, period, the end. And Sanderson was hired, in theory, to finish the series with a single volume. But there was no way he could do that in the available space, so whatever went wrong with this series, at least part of it has to be that there is too much plot.
no subject
But I disagree with the theory on one simple basis, which is that if that's true, then Jordan lied repeatedly to people, including his own editor. It's well-known that he kept giving different estimates of the series' length (I'm 95% certain it was originally sold as a trilogy), but he definitely didn't start out saying it would be twelve. Did he eventually fixate on that number? I can believe it; certainly by CoT he was swearing blind it would be two more books, period, the end. And Sanderson was hired, in theory, to finish the series with a single volume. But there was no way he could do that in the available space, so whatever went wrong with this series, at least part of it has to be that there is too much plot.