Yes, of course, why didn't I think of blaming myself for the way the timeline has been butchered and crudely stuck back together? It's obviously my fault that Brandon chose to write it the way he did.

The whole story was horribly messed up. We get POV's from characters who are obviously not where we expect them to be after reading TGS with no explanation as to what is going on. The timeline chops and changes between chapters and POV's so much that you end up with little idea of what is happening when. The visions the three ta'veren have of each other is an attempt to keep things in perspective but they could have been made much more clear, there were some obscure visions in there that gave little clue as to when the characters were in relation to each other.

And I wouldn't call anyone who comes to a fan site a casual reader. People who look online for discussion boards have more than a passing interest in the books and also had prior information about how the novels were going to be structured. Coming into TOM cold without having heard anything about how Brandon had chosen to split things up or that the timelines were going to be seriously out of sync during most of the book is confusing. Going back to Perrin, at the end of TGS Tam is with Rand and during their conversation mentions the queen and the Whitecloaks. When we join Perrin in TOM he isn't where we expect him to be from this conversation. There are no Whitecloaks, Morgase hasn't revealed herself and he's wading through the muck while reverting back to whingeing about being Lord Perrin. I don't agree that it's the smooth, sensible transition that the OP said it was (which is what I originally disagreed with BTW, I wasn't bashing Brandon for the way he chose to write it, I was simply disagreeing with the OP's point of view which clashes with my own). After the long story arcs with Rand and Egwene in TGS I think that the switch to jumping aruond in the different timelines is very noticeable, distracting and confusing when you weren't expecting it.

C xx