It's still fascinating that in September 2015, he was sure he could finish it by December 2015. But now in April 2018, he knows there's no way it's coming out in 2018 at all.
I wonder if there's still any holdouts in this thread that think he'll finish this book or Longshot the series
A Dance With Dragons was released 2-3 months after season one of GoT premiered. We are going to get an entire television series before he finishes one book.
Hell, when he made the decision to split book 4 he said book five was pretty much done and would come out the following year. Let's face it, the mereneese knot broke grrm and outside of the week mechanism the show used it was going to be hard to bring it all together. I
He should of stuck to his original plan and done the 7 year skip after a SoS. He doesn’t know what he wants to do now and will never figure it out.
he's famously said he has the ending of most major characters and the overall story laid out, but how he gets there is not known. He just sort of writes his way to it and figures it out along the way. Which is why he does so much rewriting; he doesn't put in any prelim work and has to double back and fix and add as he goes. It's maddening.
I read a story that at one point for one of his books he turned in an unfinished draft to his editor as like a progress check, then six months later he turned in a draft that was like 200 pages shorter.
He wrote like five different versions of who sailed into Meereen and when in Dance with Dragons. Not just a single chapter, but the half dozen chapters that followed, and then chose which one he preferred, chucking like one hundred pages of unusable material. What a sloppy, waste of time, way to write a book.
It’s crazy. Ten years ago that “Fire and Blood” book would of made jizz in my pants. Now I don’t even care.
Right but I mean he made such a stink about that when all he needed to do was map out even a loose outline
It was all over when HBO picked up the series. It meant he could make a ton of money without providing new content.
The series. It’s such an amazing story, the creator of it should have been someone who could finish it.
Between this and the internet discovering and spoiling his grand master twist of R+L = J, I think he decided to sit back, rest on the body of work he had already written, and let the cash roll in
Simple or not the show solved stupid fucking knot in like 15 minutes. If he gave one fuck a out his legacy or the fans or the story itself he could solve it and finish it. But he doesn't and he won't. Shit at this point I bet most fans wouldn't care if the next book had Dany on her way to Westeros from the start and just use flashbacks to give everyone a glimpse of what happened.
He created it, he’s earned exactly what he’s gotten out of it. Now as fans, do we deserve better? For sure
I don't agree it's awful. It's still great television just not as good when they had the source material. Not sure what everyone expects from them. They have an extremely complicated story with a dozen story lines at once and get left with no source material to help them for the last 3-4 seasons. Trying to come up with how to get from point A-B with no source material in a satisfying way is going to be extremely difficult.
I disagree with this take if only because season 6's finale which is still (imo) the best episode of the series. Not to mention Hardhome, Hold the Door, etc.
Is that Battle of the Bastards? That was one of the worst IMO (not counting the most recent season, which had CW level writing)
They're all fun episodes and I enjoyed watching them. But the writing for each episode was still not great. Plot holes, questionable character motivations, inconsistencies exist in each of those episodes. But they were still incredibly well-produced episodes of television that were very enjoyable. That's all in spite of the writing.
It's going to be interesting to see how they do the final season, which will basically be 8 (or however many) feature length TV movies; very different from the long and meandering storytelling style that GRRM writes with and which the show mostly followed for the first 6 years or so. It's crazy to go back and see how almost perfectly translated A Game of Thrones was to the show's first season.
The official translator of ASOIAF into Chinese (Mandarin?) says WOW will be out in 2019. *sigh* When the first book was written, I was the same age as Jon and Robb were. Now, I'm the same age as Ned.