Basically, as an editor, I caught what appeared to be a mistake that bothered me for the approximate 800 pages it too for them to clarify the situation. To me, one who notices details for a living, the state of it being a sort of flashback/slight time delay was NOT apparent. Personally, I consider this to be poor writing.

 

There was also a comment by BS about how to end one of the books.  He knew that Perrin was behind but he was reaching the page limit for the book.  To conclude the book, it could have been a "boring" Perrin chapter or and more "exciting" chapter with a different PoV.  The team made the decision to end the book with a different character which left Perrin still behind.

 

Poor planning at best, but this goes back to my thoughts of the wasted pages on the Shaido/Faile/Perrin storyline.

 

I place tGS with Tracy Jordan as one of my favorite books of the series, so take it for what it's worth.

I make that same joke in my head every time I refer to The Gathering Storm as TGS

 

The timeline thing doesn't bother me, though. It's a little more overt, but it's not like it's the first time it's ever happened in the series. There's the weird scarf related issues in The Eye of the World, for one. The prologue of A Crown of Swords shows the battle of Dumai's Wells from Sevanna's perspective. A lot of the early parts of CoT show what other people were doing before and up to the Cleansing.

 

Exaclty my thoughts on the matter.  The entire series has always taken an interesting approach to timelines in general.  Yes, this approach does grow more chaotic in the end.  However, I always just chalked that up to far too much balefire destabilizing the pattern lace.  ...  Well, that and the fact that the authors are only human, working on a story on a massive scale with thousands of characters interacting together.

 

I have a hard time juggling five main characters and a few walk-ons.  I can't imagine the chaos of head-counting the thousands of characters in the WoT series as a whole.