Very good GRRM Interview/Select passages posted/Link has two or three book 6 spo

UA412 · Jul 18, 2011

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2011/07/12/george-martin-talks-a-dance-with-dragons/

Here is the link. It has a couple book 5/6 spoilers. This post [the select quotes below] has only one spoiler post and it's from book 2

Do you know the ending?
I know the ending in broad strokes. I don’t know every little twist and turn that will get me there, and I don’t know the ending of every secondary character. But the ending and the main characters, yeah. And [Game of Thrones producers] David Benioff and Dan Weiss know some of that too, which the fans are very worried about in case I get hit by a truck.
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When fans complain about a character killed off, what do you say to them?
In some cases I sympathize. It’s hard to kill characters, they’re my children. Obviously some were marked for death in the beginning like Ned. There are plenty of books out there for fans who want comfort reading, who want to enjoy an exciting story with nothing to upset or disturb them. It’s fun to go to an Indiana Jones movie and watch him kill 40 Nazis, but there’s a place for Schindler’s List too. Schindler’s heroism resonates more with me than Indy’s — one is fun, but the other is profound and says something about human nature. I don’t know if I’m achieving it, but that’s what I’m striving for. I think fantasy after Tolkien had become Indiana Jones. They were imitating a lot of Tolkien’s tropes without capturing the spirit of Tolkien. His books are not all happy fun books.
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Do you feel like you owe your fans anything? At end of the day, is there a responsibility?
I think owe is the wrong word. I try to give them a good story. And I like my fans — the vast majority are great. I probably have more interaction with fans than any author I know. By and large, I’m very nice to my fans. But I don’t owe it to them to be nice. And if I wanted to withdraw, that would be my right. I certainly believe it’s my right to take off Sundays and watch NFL football and go to conventions and work on other projects — the more hardcore trolls, that’s what they object to. You met [his assistant] Ty, he think it’s generational. That people who are angry [about Book 5 taking six years] are younger people from what he calls The Entitlement Generation. They want instant gratification — something that they’re used to from the Internet. I’m from the Baby Boomer generation, and we had to wait for s–t, man. If I heard about a book, it might never come to the spinner rack at the local drugstore. If I wanted to see a movie, we’d have to hope they’d show it on television at some time. It’s Ty’s theory, not mine, but maybe it’s true.
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You intended the story in Book 5 to go further, I hear?
It’s always difficult to know where to break each book. You’re walking a fine line. Like Lord of the Rings, you’re writing one story. At the same time, I want each book to represent a phase of the journey. I try to end each character with a cliffhanger or some kind of resolution. And I try to make the cliffhangers the smaller portion — I don’t want eight cliffhangers. [Dance] had more cliffhangers than I ideally would have liked.
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So with the next book, have you now gotten to the point where you no longer need to have the characters in separate books?
That is certainly my hope, yes. Three years from now when I’m sitting on 1,800 pages of manuscript with no end in sight, who the hell knows.
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There was a fair amount of explicit sex in the series and some fans of the books were taken aback.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this with HBO is that I wanted to keep the sex. We had some real problems because Dany is only 13 in the books, and that’s based on medieval history. They didn’t have this concept of adolescence or the teenage years. You were a child or you were an adult. And the onset of sexual maturity meant you were an adult. So I reflected that in the books. But then when you go to film it you run into people going crazy about child pornography and there’s actual laws about how you can’t depict a 13 year old having sex even if you have an 18 year old acting the part — it’s illegal in the United Kingdom. So we ended up with a 22 year old portraying an 18 year old, instead of an 18 year old portraying a 13 year old. If we decided to lose the sex we could have kept the original ages. And once you change the age of one character you have to change the ages of all the characters, and change the date of the war [that dethroned the Mad King]. The fact we made all these changes indicates how important we thought sex was.
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The big question is what’s going to happen in the ratings between seasons. But I suspect, if anything, it’s going to come back bigger.
Well, Natalie Dormer [cast as Margaery Tyrell] is a great choice to start with. She was best thing about The Tudors and the best Anne Boleyn I’ve ever seen.
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Are there any changes the TV show made that you particularly liked?
I loved some of the new scenes they added. As a novelist, I have certain tools like internal monologue and the device of the unreliable narrator. I can have flashbacks and dreams, which are pretty hokey in a TV series. So they had to insert some new scenes. I loved the interplay between Varys and Littlefinger, which never occurred in the books since neither is a viewpoint character. I loved the scene of Drogo ripping out Mago’s throat, which was entirely new. But that’s going to have ramifications if we go the full length down the pike. I’ve talked to Dan and Dave about the butterfly effect — you’re familiar with the classic Ray Bradbury short story?
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Was there anything you missed from the book?
I wish the tournament was much bigger. They originally scripted in the first draft a parade of knights and a dozen jousts that they had to cut for budgetary reasons. And I would have liked the crowd to have been much bigger. This is like the Super Bowl in the books and draws people from all over the Seven Kingdoms.

Sansa no longer telling Cersei about her father’s plans to leave — were you OK with that change?
It didn’t bother me.

TV viewers might have never forgiven her.
A lot of book readers haven’t forgiven her. The other thing was lost was Catelyn to Jon Snow saying, “It should have been you” [after Bran was crippled].

For me, seeing her in the show, the way she acted toward him, the visual added a lot of harshness without that line.
Yes, just her face, which you can’t do in the books. It got the same thing across.
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One big concern has been what if the TV series surpasses where you are in the books. For awhile, that seemed premature. Now that season one has done well, it’s worth asking.
There’s two questions here. The first is: How long will it take me to write the next book. Will Winds of Winter go smoothly or is it going to be Feast and Dance all over again? I certainly hope it’s not the latter. The other issue is: What is what is HBO going to do if we get a third season and beyond? Storm of Swords is a gigantic book. I was hoping they’d give us 12 episodes for Clash. So I don’t know how they’ll get everything in. But there’s no way they can get Storm into 10 or even 12. My hope is they’ll split that into two seasons. There’s nothing in the law that says each season must cover one book. The only danger of catching up is if we have to do all of Storm, and then Feast and Dance have to be re-combined. Then there’s a danger they would catch up with me. I think I’ll have Winds out by then, but they could catch up with me before [Book 7] A Dream of Spring.
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VAGUE BOOK 2 SPOILERS

Which episode of Game of Thrones are you writing next season?
The Battle of the Blackwater, God help me. David and Dan must hate me.

That’s the one where you have to be most conscious of budgetary decisions.
It’s very tough because we don’t have the budget to do the battle in the book. We just don’t.

Well, they have to be able to show the ships and what happens to them, right?
I hope so. We’ll see. I’m writing it. I’m cutting certain things. We’ll see once I turn it in if we can do it. When you look HBO’s Rome–

Loved Rome.
I loved it too, but what about the battles?

We see Caesar leave the tent to go to war, then he comes back and falls asleep.
Caesar leaves the tent. Pompey leaves the tent. Then we see Pompey’s banner in the mud. And Caesar comes back to the tent. The next episode, Pompey describes the battle to Pullo and Vorenus drawing it in the dirt with a stick to explain what happened. For the Battle of Actium, they open with Mark Anthony floating on a piece of wood — and Rome had a bigger budget than we do. I’ve been trying to tell the fans that. On some level they’re expecting the Battle of Pelennor Fields [from Peter Jackson's The Return of the King].

Fans don’t distinguish as much between mediums now.
They don’t. And television has set that up by being increasingly good. Back in the 1960s or ’70s, you could tell TV show from a movie in three frames just way it was shot and lit. But you can’t these days.

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Gritty Badger · Jul 18, 2011

fuck that fat bastard

Swt · Jul 18, 2011

I liked it, thanks.

Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber. What a fantastic HBO series that would be.
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Anyone read this?

dcon79 · Jul 19, 2011

"So I reflected that in the books. But then when you go to film it you run into people going crazy about child pornography and there’s actual laws about how you can’t depict a 13 year old having sex even if you have an 18 year old acting the part — it’s illegal in the United Kingdom."

He seems a little too bummed about this

UA412 · Jul 19, 2011

Sure he's bummed that he had to change all the ages of his characters.

He's also probably a

Swt · Jul 19, 2011

I'm bummed about it too

dcon79 · Jul 19, 2011

Doc Blanchard said:

Sure he's bummed that he had to change all the ages of his characters.

He's also probably a
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What I was implying

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