He’s been gone for a month. But I still can’t help but feel a great sense of loss in the wake of his passing. Even though I never met the man, Robert Jordan had a huge influence on my life during my teenage years. And to think, I came upon his books entirely by accident.

I was about fourteen. There on the lamp table in the living room of my best friend’s house was a copy of The Eye of the World in its first paperback printing (the one with the less-defined maps).

As you can imagine from reading my blog, I was originally drawn to the book by its beautiful cover and interior paintings. I remember the moment very distinctly, the feels, the smells. This may sound ridiculous, but deciding to pick up that book, to borrow it from my friend’s father, was a defining moment in my life.

All because of a beautiful cover. Okay, I guess it wasn’t just because of that–the tome’s width and heft were impressive. I’d been on a kick of reading thick fantasy novels for a year already, and I’d already gone through the Tad Williams’ books, and here was another book that looked like it would fill my hunger for thick fantasy.

And it did, every wit.

Two writers had a significant impact on the way I learned to write during that time of my life. Robert Jordan was one of these. When I was 18, I finished writing my first book and gave it to my father to read. He was the first one to point out all of the Jordan-isms I had used. It left me raising my eyebrows, having done this quite unintentionally. I spent the next little while trying not to write like him.

When I started working at the book store, I used our computer system (still sans internet) to find as many books as I could under Robert Jordan’s other pen names. A lot of my searching was fruitless, and I had to wait for the books to come out revealing that “Reagan O’Neal” and “Jackson O’Reilly” were actually pen names for Robert Jordan. And the bigger realization discovered in some encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy that Robert Jordan was really the pen name of James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

Gasp. It was like discovering that the man with fire-for-a-mouth that haunted Rand’s dreams wasn’t actually the Dark One.

I don’t know what ever happened to that first Eye of the World paperback that belonged to my friend’s dad. It was in my locker at school one day, and the next day it was gone. I don’t think he made me replace the book. Paperback books were transitory things to him. But to me . . . that book was like gold.

I read The Eye of the World in between classes at high school.

I read The Great Hunt while in line at Disneyland. The book’s there in every family picture of that trip, my nose in the book or my finger marking my place.

When my father barely slipped by the grasp of death in a terrible car accident, I stayed the evening by his bedside in the ER. The book I brought with me was the new Jordan paperback: The Dragon Reborn.

I had The Shadow Rising in my big hunting coat as Dad set me down at the bottom of a gulley and said he’d go to the top and flush the deer through. When the autumn sun rose high enough in the sky, I took the coat off, I sat on a sun-warmed rock, and I read.

I can go through my junior high, high school, and college years and remember what was going on in my life based on which Jordan book had come out at the time.

Coincidentally, I was thinking about RJ the day he died. I was on my way home from Idaho and had just pulled off the freeway into Provo. My thought was, “I need to check out RJ’s blog and see how he’s doing.”

I didn’t get around to that until the next day, when early that morning, a friend at work informed me of RJ’s death.

I’ll admit, I spent the day in a pseudo sense of mourning; it felt as if a friend had died.

And he really was a friend. I’d spent autumn afternoons in the mountains with him; I’d stood in line with him at Disneyland; he’d been there when my dad was in the emergency room at the hospital.

Goodbye, RJ. Thanks for all the good times.

Tomorrow, in honor of Robert Jordan, I’ll be doing a book cover countdown of the Twelve Best Wheel of Time Book Covers.