How old will you be when the last ASOIAF novel comes out?

[ArtNJ]

Kat, my base point was a pretty simple one. Its strange to take so incredbly long when there is so much money on the table. He continually spends tons of time on projects with a tiny fraction of the dollars at issue. I cant think of any explanation other than that he doesnt give a *&^! about money at this point and perhaps also is finding the last books a painful struggle.

There is no point to comparing him to other slow authors, because they are not in the same situation, leaving potentially millions on the table. Even assuming he finishes at some point, the economic benefit to finishing while the sales bump (more like a sales tidal wave) from the series is still in full swing vs finishing years later is undeniably huge. For some reason, he doesnt care.

 

[KatG]

Of course the circumstances are now entirely different, as I've pointed out. Martin told us exactly what was going on with Dance and why it was taking so long. As for Winter decidedly not coming, I can't say, because he won't tell us.

No, the circumstances aren't at all different. He's having trouble getting the big book finished -- probably because it's running long and he'll have to figure out where to cut, actually, if we did want to go with his history. Martin stopped talking because a minority slice of fans were obsessive and aggressive -- they didn't care why he was having trouble and no explanation satisfied them. Believe me, I had conversations for years with some of them -- and they were the more polite ones. The same wailing -- he doesn't care, he owes us to spit it out now, he's goofing off, he's fat and will have a heart attack, he's tired of the series and will never finish it, he should talk to us, he talks to us so clearly he isn't really concentrating and things didn't go exactly the way he said that he hoped they would so clearly he is doing awful things -- all the things that have been said in this thread were said over and over about Dragons. It made them upset when he talked about writing the books, so he stopped. The only reason we've had some recent info is because of the issue as to whether he'd get book 6 out in time for the t.v. series, and because he gave up some excerpts at conventions so he could get out alive. So he decloaked here and there. But the same reaction we get, no matter what is said, no matter how much or how little info those fans have. It's a basic denial of how fiction writing works.

I didn't bring up King's Dark Tower to do a comparison of the delays in their writing the series (because such a comparison means nothing anyway.) I brought it up about the reaction of fans to the series. What has happened with a minority slice of Martin's Song fans is weird. It is almost unprecedented. That's why Neil Gaiman and other authors find it deeply strange. King's Dark Tower series had a somewhat lesser version of it, so comes closest. Rowling got a bit of it when there were delays in writing Book #5 of Harry Potter, though teens were less frothing. Jordan did get some with Wheel of Time towards the middle, then end, but nothing comparable. Thomas Harris got a tiny bit in the years delay of the sequel to Silence of the Lambs. But that's very unusual -- out of SFF, this stuff doesn't go on, even with the one story in multi-books, and even within SFF, the reaction of that slice of fans to Martin's Song is unique. You basically have to go back to something like Charles Dickens and the Americans standing on the docks waiting the arrival of the next installment of one of his novels to match the obsession over Song of Ice and Fire. To the rest of us, you guys are raving about Martin's struggling with his most important book series like he kicked you out of heaven or stole your kid. And the same thing happened with Dragons -- the exact same arguments you are making now.

And it didn't even start with Dragons. It started almost right after A Storm of Swords came out. That was in 2000, and after that a lot of stuff started happening with the Internet and there was a lot more access to authors than back in King's time. I think we could say there's a correlation, though I don't say it's causation. When you had Facebook, Twitter and Martin starting his blog and responding to comments, with A Feast For Crows coming out then too, then it seemed to go into warp overdrive obviously, but even before then, Swords seems to have touched some nerve of desire.

Actually, I do care. I haven't read many of the works of the past, but I want to, and I've read a lot about them. And not having read much doesn't mean I've read none, or don't care. As for 80's, I've read quite a bit. I read some Shannara (enough to know I don't care for it), Donaldson, Kay, the earlier Feist novels, Eddings, Gemmell, Cook and Williams. And please don't assume that if I didn't name a particular author, that I haven't read or "don't care" about them.

That's not what I said. I didn't say that you didn't care about fantasy fiction you read. I'm saying that you didn't care about gaps in series by SFF authors from that time period that you had no interest in -- you aren't interested in what wasn't that unusual a practice in the SFF field for many decades. And maybe some you have read -- Cook is supposed to finally complete all his storylines with the Black Company series in two more volumes. He announced it long ago. It's been sixteen years since the last Black Company book and still no two last volumes to finish the story, even though he retired from his day job and can write full time. And yet there is no finish the book Glen websites. Again, the focus on Martin's Song has been weird. It's not a matter of not caring. It's a matter of demands from caring that nobody else has been getting, in part because Martin's series was a big bestseller and then got the t.v. show. It's very likely that the deeply complaining slice of Martin's Song fans might be less obsessed if the t.v. show had not existed, but how much is unclear since it started long before the t.v. series.

But even if such a series exists, simple answer is that was then, this is now. Expectations are different now.

And why exactly is that Martin's problem? If a minority slice of fans have more demanding expectations, that's on the fans, not the authors. What we had in the past was pretty much what we have now -- serial trilogies or sometimes quartets, that would wrap up one plotline in a trilogy and then continue the other plotlines in the next trilogy, multi-volume epics like Wheel of Time, scattered standalones, and serial series in which there's one big overarching plot (and sometimes antagonist) that extends through the series, and smaller plots for each book in the series.

Again, if it were just a matter of wanting the ending of this not particularly subtle but giant fairy tale, that's done. Martin has explained what the ending is going to be throughout the series and the t.v. show will give you the visual detailed version of it in what was to be two, now going to be three years. That will happen if George dies tomorrow. So it's not an issue, with this slice of fans, of getting the ending -- not anymore anyway. It's their -- your -- belief that Martin is withholding from you and that he has no right to struggle with these books and delay your reading them. It's not a reasonable demand. And believe me, again, I've heard all the arguments as to why it is somehow a reasonable demand when it came to Dragons. The dissections of every scrap of information, the insistence that if Martin just did things this way or talked to the fans that way, that it would somehow make it all better, when nothing made it all better -- not even the publication of Dragons -- there's something very different culturally going on here than just the completion of a story. It's kind of like Martin is seen as writing a holy series and he's failing their faith or something.

I should let you know that I pulled this info straight from Werthead, who has researched the subject quite thoroughly.

You don't want to invoke Werthead, since he's got the same view I have. Which is why he did that detailed timeline above that showed the gaps aren't as big and unreasonable as you're trying to invoke. Which you largely ignored.

King is a writer who utilizes many genres, but popular perception is that he is a horror writer.

And seventy percent of horror is fantasy fiction. Fantasy horror is actually part of the fantasy field and fantasy fans read it regularly. But even if that were not the case, the Dark Tower series is not horror -- it's dark fantasy, and the first parts were published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And it was fantasy fans who were obsessed with the Dark Tower books and bugged King about finishing them and whined about delays when he struggled to write them, even though he is Stephen King and so contractually could have at any time just concentrated on them until he finished (but did not because the writing doesn't work that way.) But again, it wasn't near the level of what's gone on with that slice of fans towards Song. It's just the closest reaction of fans that I could think of.

People don't tend to expect "the next volume in this series" from King because he mostly doesn't write series. And as such, he wasn't sure what to do or where he was going with The Dark Tower.

Martin mostly doesn't write series either. He was best known for SF before Song. And King did in fact plot out the first novellas of Tower and did eventually plan out the other books. Martin has had an overall outline of Song, but he does not have a detailed outline of how he's getting to the end. That's why the books would get so long -- he feels his way and new plotlines, cultures and parts of the world developed from the writing and then have to be worked together. That's why he wrote a book that then he had to scrap because his feeling around didn't work on that one, and started over with what would be Crows and Dragons. The idea that just because an author knows what the ending is going to be and has an overall outline that this somehow makes it easier is again not how fiction writing works. We hoped Winter would go faster because it wasn't coming out of whole cloth, but much has changed, and obviously there are problems.

But I acknowledge writers are different.

Are you really? Because I don't think you are. You are continually comparing Martin to other authors and saying if they did this, why can't he write like they did. That seems to indicate that you think the process for each author and each work those authors do should go the same about the same rate. Because otherwise, why compare them at all? If they're all different, then comparisons don't mean anything, do they? And yet, you are continually making them. But if we compare on delays, you're brushing other delays off as not comparable. So it's a bit biased.

Scott Lynch took five years to give us the third Gentlemen Bastards novel, but factor in clinical depression and a divorce and the fact that it only took five years seems like a miracle.

Yeah, well other people didn't see it that way (a bit of a spill over of attitude from the Martin experience.) A few of them attacked him for it anyway (though not thankfully on the scale of Song,) and attacked him earlier for not talking to them about what the hold up was. And your assumption that Martin hasn't had depression and other life events that have gotten in the way, that the promotion obligations are slight and unimportant, etc. shows again a lot less patience and understanding with Martin than you're offering other authors who have less on their plates. And again, this is what we saw with Dragons. Even when Martin explained things going on -- what he was struggling with on the book, times when he got ill, etc., people deemed that not sufficient and went on to lambast his person. Of an author whose work they liked. So again, this is not a matter of people being understanding and then losing patience. It's a relentless demand and they don't care what happens as long as Martin meets it. Which again, is weird and has not happened to other authors.

As previously mentioned, Thomas Harris never promises you the next book, or if there will even be one.

First off, Harris contracted for the sequel to Silence of the Lambs, so actually did have an obligation to attempt it. That it took seven years did not freak his publisher out because that happens with fiction authors and they knew the audience would still be there. And second, Martin never promised you a book either. He promised that he'd try to write the Song of Ice and Fire series, which is all any author can do. They can't guarantee you they'll get a book out, even if it's under license contract. So again, this argument that Martin promised us -- which again we got with Dragons where he did put the book out -- doesn't have a lot to do with reality. He gave estimates, some of which he thought he had a good chance of meeting, a couple of which for Crows and Dragons were correct. He mostly stopped giving estimates because people kept insisting that he had horribly betrayed them by not managing them. This claim that his estimates are law, and then he's going back on his word -- again, there is an almost religious obsession about it. An estimate is an estimate. Authors are not seers about how their brains will work and how their lives will roll. You don't get a book just because you want it.

His peers include many authors who have produced similar bodies of work when it comes to word count, book size and volume. His are among the longer works in his field, but as I showed in my last response, they are far from record-breaking or even oddly large.

Actually, they are really large, even for epic fantasy. And second again, see, you're comparing his writing output to the other authors. That's not acknowledging that authors or their works are different. A Song of Ice and Fire is an incredibly complicated story logistically and to some degree emotionally. But again, if those constraints are brought up, they are always waved away. Martin should be able to produce the books because you want them in the time that you declare reasonable based on the output of entirely other authors and your own feelings rather than it being Martin with his brain and circumstances. And if he doesn't, it's a big betrayal. I can understand disappointment. I am currently not watching the t.v. series after enjoying it because I decided the t.v. series would be there later to watch and I wanted Martin's writing version first if he manages it. So yeah, it would have been cool if Winter had come out late last year or this year. But I don't feel that Martin betrayed me or broke an imaginary promise because that didn't happen. He's working on the book. And he doesn't even owe me that. But I'm not desperately waiting to hear from him about how it's going. It will come when he's got it.

But if he's had similar problems with Winds, he hasn't said so.

Yeah, and he's not going to say anything about it because of what happened with him talking about Dragons. People threatened him when he talked about the writing and problems. That's how bad it was. So no, you don't get to know what problems he has with writing Winter. And frankly, you have no right to know what problems ANY author is having with their work. Again, it's not a reasonable demand, unless you are their publisher partner.

But does he really need six or seven?

Yes, it might. Because it's a big honking complicated series and because a ton in it has changed from what he originally envisioned. Again, the assumption that you know better how to write the series coming from his brain is the weird thing.

This time he doesn't have to worry about a completely new outline or writer's block or narrative issues (again, if he has, he hasn't talked about it), and while there have been book tours and writing for GOT, he's cut all that out to finish the book, stating he thought he could have it done before the show catches up with the books.

Again, things have changed in the course of writing the series. This faith you have that an overall outline is magic is strange. And again, he won't tell you what the problems are because he did that before and people went up the walls. And again, the duties he's had because of the t.v. show and the series turning into a phenom with a whole bevy of international publishers wanting him to promote the series are larger, not smaller, than when he was working on Dragons. He has cut back on as many as he can. And that he thought he could have it done in time with the t.v. series but didn't make it is not strange and is not a cause for despair, certainly with Martin's history. It wasn't an unbreakable vow, dude. It was an estimate. And that he didn't meet the estimate was not a failure of him as a person, just a setback. But for a slice of Martin's fans, that's not good enough. And it seems to go beyond anything actually having to do with the books.

Why not leave it in the capable hands of Daniel Abraham, just for example? Or Ty Franck?

Or the t.v. show, which will give you a version in line with the outline and give you the end in three years -- and which has all of Martin's outline and notes. If it was just about the series being finished, then there wouldn't be this obsession with Martin's writing. Martin whined about not wanting anyone else to do it long before the t.v. show existed and at a very different point in the process. Once he gave the material to the t.v. show, that was it. They can do whatever they want with it (and film contracts are throughout the universe in perpetuity in term.) If Martin dies before finishing, then he will be dead and has no say what is done with the work. It will be up to his estate, which may or may not go along with any wishes he might bother to have. And the t.v. studio has no obligation whatsoever. So they'll get Abraham or somebody else to finish it, if that ends up being the case.

And yet that long ago statement of Martin's under different circumstances is treated as holy writ and routinely invoked with anger by a slice of the fans. So again, you aren't worried about having the end of the series. This is anger directly at Martin for not being able to perform how people demand he perform. It's a much more complicated cultural response than angst over a story in a series.

Because I know your heart is good, and because you insisted, I broke the thread topic here and went over this again. Even though I know it's largely pointless. But when Neil Gaiman said that Martin was not your, ahem, not the best word to use for it but you know what it was, he was speaking essential truth. This thread topic is largely a joke because at this point, nobody cares about how the story goes and gets finished. They are just mad at Martin for what they think is effing up. And I'm not mad at people for having strong feelings about the series. But I am exasperated at years of arguing that you don't actually own and control an author and that no, Martin did not do something horrible to you because he mis-estimated how long it would take him to create something.

I can't speak for the entire audience, but I'd watch the hell out of movies based on Lynch, Abraham, Abercrombie, Sykes,

Well you have Expanse from Abraham and Franck, which is quite a good t.v. series. And Lynch, Abercrombie and Sykes have all been optioned (at least I think I heard that Sykes was optioned, can't swear on it.)

Could anything be cooler than a Ketty Jay live-action adaptation?

That one would be expensive. But it's entirely possible that it's been optioned too. Chris does movies too, screenwriting, and so I think there were plans.

Of course not, but it's a huge (I'd even say dominant) part of the genre, though I expect you'll tell me I'm wrong.

I never said that. I just said that it's not all the fantasy field. Like many who love epic fantasy, you started off talking about Hollywood not liking epic fantasy (unless it was YA and/or t.v. which didn't count apparently,) and then started saying that Hollywood didn't like fantasy for film in general, unless it was YA (which doesn't count apparently.) So I'm reminding you that sec world pre-industrial epic fantasy and fantasy fiction in general are not the same thing. Fantasy in general is doing just fine in film/t.v. Epic fantasy is less liked for film than it is for t.v. now, no question. That's directly related to the cost of special effects re how Hollywood does film budgets, the unease that epic fantasy series loved by Americans are going to sell to the critical foreign box office and get the U.S. fans to turn out in big enough numbers, and the belief that they can build a cult following for a t.v. series over time with folk who haven't read the books easier than getting them to pony up money for a movie. How right those concerns are is not the issue. If Cameron wants to do a fantasy-like space opera story in space with Avatar, then they are counting on Cameron to bring the audience in. Lord of the Rings was big enough to be worth the work when costs for effects got cheaper.

Another issue is the adaptation scripts -- finding someone who will do it right and who knows how to do it, understands the material, can be harder with epic fantasy than science fiction. A television series that doesn't work out still can make some money off of ads and merchandising, even re-runs on Netflix. A movie that flops is a big loss. So for instance, Preacher, the brutal comic series, was in development hell for years about making some movies from it. Eventually you had Rogen and his partner come in with a television adaptation proposal, and that was deemed more workable with AMC. Easier to get the audience, easier to get a long-time pay-off, etc. So it's not just it being epic fantasy; it's about them being complicated stories that might not take as well with movie audiences, theater distributors, and film business conditions.

Special effects and large costs are perfectly fine if it's an SF/action summer blockbuster-type movie starring Will Smith or Dwayne Johnson.

You mean the Will Smith movie that flopped and probably resulted in them not wanting to pay him a big fee to be in Independence Day 2? You have to look at what they are starring in -- original SF, where they don't have to get into complicated rights sales like adaptations, don't have to worry about unhappy fans, and usually are fulfilling a production deal with the star, or, more commonly now, sequels and reboots of properties that worked in the past. Which is why there was a Conan remake. Some of the SF is working, some of it is not. But it's easier for them to do because it's like a western and it's less culture dependent. A spaceship is a spaceship, but a made up epic fantasy culture may cause confusion in China where they may not have widely read the book. And China is keeping Hollywood afloat right now.

Plus, China, Japan and other Asian countries are putting out plenty of epic and historical fantasy movies of their own, which do quite well (and usually look gorgeous.) When all those low budget sword and sorcery movies were coming out in the 1980's (many of them based on comics that were widely known, or internationally loved Jim Henson who still gambled on Dark Crystal,) those movies weren't going overseas and a lot of them never went to theaters, but direct to video or in theaters for B movies in cities. If they did decently past their modest budgets domestically, that was it. They weren't the tentpoles, most of them. But now, even the B movies with modest budgets have to perform internationally. That changes the game. Whereas t.v. doesn't have to worry about that, even though the market is more international than it used to be. It's not a limited theater distribution system, like film.

Well there ya go. Comics are a more acceptable form to adapt from.

Comics have a more international market than most books and internationally recognized iconic characters. Comics have an entire merchandising tie-in market that Hollywood can tap into with the films. (Nobody much wants book merchandise unless there's a film or t.v. series adaptation.) Comics have fanbases that turn out more regularly for film/t.v. adaptations than book fans do. Comics can easily be made into cartoons and animated films as well as the live action movies, etc.

Why should they each and every one be adaptations from books?

Again, adaptations are more complicated and expensive to secure than just buying a screenplay and then having a bunch of people work on it.

They also tend to be low-budget, poorly acted, written and directed.

Oh, you're arguing for Krull and Legend to be seen as masterpieces of cinema, are you? (I will spot you Tim Curry.) Krull and Legend were both low budget B-movies. Scorpion King was a little bigger, but still was put out as a more mid-budget spin-off of a hit, in April well before what was then the summer tentpole season. (Now that season starts in mid-March, but not back then.)

90% of that is based on old fairy tales, real-world cultural myths, epic poems, children and YA novels, video games, or are B-movies. All of these are considered safer box-office bets than pure epic pre-industrial fantasy.

Yeah, again, because they're internationally known, have the incredibly reliable family audience, or in the case of B-movies, are less of a financial risk with less distribution. See above.

This despite the fact that one of the best-selling film series of the past twenty years was Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.

Yes, because it was the freaking Lord of the Rings. It was like Superman or Star Trek. It is internationally beloved. And even then, it took thirty years of development hell, Jackson setting up his own industrial complex and way of doing special effects, massive tax breaks from New Zealand, and an incredibly complicated set up of rights that is still going through lawsuits, plus years to pull off. It could have gone badly.

The only one you mentioned above that falls into none of those categories starred Dwayne Johnson, who can make a hit out of almost anything.

At the time, no he couldn't. Johnson was known as a wrestler then, not proven much as an actor. He sufficiently impressed them enough in The Mummy 2 that they spun it off, hoping the Mummy audiences would go see Scorpion King too, plus they were making games from them. But it only had a $60 mil budget, which even for 2002 wasn't that high, and it was profitable but not a huge hit, so the sequel was direct to video and not with the Rock. His next starring film, The Rundown, was a flop. It was actually kids' movies -- The Game Plan and Race to Witch Mountain (a reboot,) that made him a star as an actor. And then he got involved in the Fast & Furious franchise. Hercules was not a hit in the U.S. but was a hit internationally -- again, the game has changed.

Again, you have to remember -- a fantasy author might be a bestseller by selling say 40,000 copies of the book and getting a few international deals. That's not enough for Hollywood. You either have to build up a larger, preferably international audience, or be something they think they can turn into a lower budget niche audience film or t.v. show. Add the costliness of epic fantasy and concerns about it translating to world markets, and they aren't going to do it that often and not tentpole. Abercrombie has a shot.

ArtNJ:

Money is not why Martin started Song of Ice and Fire. If it was about money, he'd have just stayed with screenwriting. Folks expected the series to do well because it was strongly written and because Martin was very well known and respected in the SFF field (and better known for SF.) But no one, including Martin, expected what would happen with the series becoming very big in the field, nor did they know that there would ever be a t.v. series that would turn the books into phenom sales, and that the t.v. series would end up being in a time crunch with the writing of the books. Martin didn't know that it would be a seven book series, instead of three, that Crows and Dragons would ever exist, that this would take a big chunk of his life, etc.

If it was about money, then he could have hung it up long ago. If he didn't care, he could just stop writing the series. Again, this is the same set of complaints and rationales that were made about Dragons before Dragons came out. He's writing the series because it is the big work of his life, because he cares about it, because he's going to try to finish it, and he's not going to churn it out like it's an empty farce that generates cash. As for smaller projects, they mean things to him too, some of them are tied into Westeros, some of them like the Wild Card anthologies help other authors which is a tradition in SFF. And it's actually helpful to authors often to have other projects to work on and give their brains a break that helps them work out and recharge for the main project. He isn't doing this because he has a lack of will, or because he is callous or because he wants to sit on piles of money and laugh at everyone. He's writing this because he had a dream a long time ago, came up with a series idea from it and has pursued it. Which fiction authors do even when people don't pay them for it. Fiction writing is usually about the worst, most time consuming way to attempt to make any money at all. When people do it, most of the time, it's because it's important to them, even if it's just a paperback category romance or a short story that they might get $10 for.

In this case, Martin's writing and world creation turned out to be very compelling to many people. Which is why, even though there is a t.v. show that will give you all the information and creative spectacle you could want and in a relatively short period of time, people are still screaming at him. But screaming "why can't you be what I want" doesn't change what is. Screaming "there's a lot of money on the table in addition to what you already have," doesn't change what is. What is, is that the book will be done when it's done.

 

[Kingsman]

Wow this thread just keeps on giving (I like to picture KatG banging her head on her desk repeatedly everytime she reads a reply)

All I'll add is that IMO Martin only has himself to blame for the reactions of certain fans..not all as you'll never please everyone but the way I see it, the moaning only kicked into hyperdrive around the time he told fans to F*OFF. Combined with his notablog post on everything other than how the writings going, which made it look like all he did was watch football and go to conventions, which in turn made people question his work ethic(had a laugh recently when an episode of IZombie referenced this).

Thankfully I'm happy to just watch the tv show and see how it ends that way. One day I'd like to be able to read the whole series, but if I don't, I wont be to phased.

 

[Takoren]

Thankfully I'm happy to just watch the tv show and see how it ends that way. One day I'd like to be able to read the whole series, but if I don't, I wont be to phased.

I wish I could just do that myself. Problem is, I, like many others, think of the books as the "real story" and the TV series more like a "play based on actual events" or something. The TV show is great, and like I said earlier I actually appreciate how it's handled some of the later story better than how the books did, but still, I started this series reading it. I don't want to finish by watching it.

But I agree with pretty much everything you said.

 

[Takoren]

No, the circumstances aren't at all different.

So he's had to completely throw out his outline again and start over?

He's having trouble getting the big book finished -- probably because it's running long and he'll have to figure out where to cut, actually, if we did want to go with his history.

I am beyond positive that he's already reached a point where he can safely cut if off and release what he has. If that makes Dream a bit longer than we're used to, so be it.

Martin stopped talking because a minority slice of fans were obsessive and aggressive -- they didn't care why he was having trouble and no explanation satisfied them.

I know there are unreasonable idiots out there; there's a guy on IMDB who refers to him solely as "The Fat Man" and does nothing but denigrate Martin for "sitting around eating pizza and watching Football and not writing." He firmly believes that Martin hasn't written a word since releasing Dance, but then, before Dance was released he was convinced Martin hadn't written a word since Feast. I eventually decided he was a troll and put him on ignore.

But for Martin to tell all of us to f--- off regardless, he turned a bunch of apologists, like me, into the very people he assumed we already were.

Believe me, I had conversations for years with some of them -- and they were the more polite ones. The same wailing -- he doesn't care, he owes us to spit it out now, he's goofing off, he's fat and will have a heart attack, he's tired of the series and will never finish it, he should talk to us, he talks to us so clearly he isn't really concentrating and things didn't go exactly the way he said that he hoped they would so clearly he is doing awful things -- all the things that have been said in this thread were said over and over about Dragons. It made them upset when he talked about writing the books, so he stopped. The only reason we've had some recent info is because of the issue as to whether he'd get book 6 out in time for the t.v. series, and because he gave up some excerpts at conventions so he could get out alive. So he decloaked here and there. But the same reaction we get, no matter what is said, no matter how much or how little info those fans have. It's a basic denial of how fiction writing works.

Don't lump me in with those guys. I am nothing more than a reader who enjoyed the books and wants to enjoy the next one. I did get irritated at how Martin would excitedly announce this or that he was working on and none of it was Dance. I kept wondering why he expected us to get excited over the re-release of a children's book or collection of stories he edited when he all knew what we really wanted from him.

I didn't bring up King's Dark Tower to do a comparison of the delays in their writing the series (because such a comparison means nothing anyway.) I brought it up about the reaction of fans to the series.

You mean fans contacting King repeatedly over the years wondering when, or if, he'd ever continue that series? The reaction was a bit more calm, I grant you, but this was because A) King didn't give the appearance of sitting around doing nothing; he released several other books over the years and B) He never told fans to f--- off.

What has happened with a minority slice of Martin's Song fans is weird. It is almost unprecedented.

And you've never paused to ask yourself why that might be?

That's why Neil Gaiman and other authors find it deeply strange.

Gaiman doesn't really do series much. But as much as there are authors that "find it strange" I've seen others that refuse to comment, but have hinted that they're also mystified by how long Martin's taking. I've seen newspaper articles talking about the delay. There's a reason this kind of reaction is unprecedented, but you refuse to believe it.

Rowling got a bit of it when there were delays in writing Book #5 of Harry Potter, though teens were less frothing

This was a three-year wait. This is likely why there wasn't as much "frothing". Again, HP was seven volumes long, just like ASOIAF is supposed to be. Did it take over 20 years to complete? Did its readers start as teens and have teenage children of their own still waiting for the next volume?

Jordan did get some with Wheel of Time towards the middle, then end, but nothing comparable.

Jordan let us know about his illness pretty soon after it was diagnosed. We readers are not monsters (mostly). If a man is sick, we cut him a ton of slack. But Martin keeps insisting that despite his weight he's perfectly healthy.

To the rest of us, you guys are raving about Martin's struggling with his most important book series like he kicked you out of heaven or stole your kid. And the same thing happened with Dragons -- the exact same arguments you are making now.

You keep using that phrase: exactly the same arguments you're making now. Again, I was a Martin apologist while waiting for Dance. But I fully expected that now that he'd gotten over the hump, the next two volumes would come at a quicker rate. I still cut him some slack, thinking at worse I'd be waiting until 2014 for Winds. At this point I'll be surprised if we even see it next year.

And it didn't even start with Dragons. It started almost right after A Storm of Swords came out.

I don't think there was as much fervor but I could be wrong, as I started reading the series in 2003. So obviously I was not one of those screaming back then.

That's not what I said. I didn't say that you didn't care about fantasy fiction you read. I'm saying that you didn't care about gaps in series by SFF authors from that time period that you had no interest in

Again, I do have interest in this time period. I wasn't alive to experience most of it, but I have read books from that time period, and before, and will read more. Of course I'll have less of an issue with gaps I wasn't around to experience.

-- you aren't interested in what wasn't that unusual a practice in the SFF field for many decades.

And here is where I don't understand. You mentioned the 70's and 80's specifically. Again, please tell me about routine gaps between volumes back then, and please understand before you do that I don't count the following:

-A follow-up series that took a while to come out after the main series was finished.
-A stand-alone novel that got an unexpected follow-up years later.
-A "finished" series that the author later decided to revisit.
-A series of stories featuring the same character, each one a stand-alone story.
-A follow-up or "sequel" written primarily because fans demanded one and the author eventually relented.

I don't count these because none of them involve a multi-part story that we're routinely forced to wait five plus years before we find out what happens next.

And maybe some you have read -- Cook is supposed to finally complete all his storylines with the Black Company series in two more volumes. He announced it long ago. It's been sixteen years since the last Black Company book and still no two last volumes to finish the story, even though he retired from his day job and can write full time.

I have heard that, and would be more upset except that once could call The Black Company a series of series. There was the initial trilogy (The Books of the North) the follow-up (The Silver Spike), a following duology (The Books of the South) and four "final" volumes (The Books of the Glittering Stone). Really, I personally don't feel like more is needed.

And yet there is no finish the book Glen websites.

I think a lot of Black Company fans feel like I do; that what we have is plenty.

Again, the focus on Martin's Song has been weird. It's not a matter of not caring. It's a matter of demands from caring that nobody else has been getting, in part because Martin's series was a big bestseller and then got the t.v. show.

Well, like you said, this started before there was a TV show, even before it became a huge bestseller.

And why exactly is that Martin's problem?

Because a lot of issues that existed then don't now. And the audience is larger now. In the 70's, fantasy was a niche market of a niche market. Now it's a viable market of its own. Fantasy readers in the 70's were happy to have anything to read at all, or at least that's what I've gathered, or read just as much SF as they did F and therefore had plenty to read.

What we had in the past was pretty much what we have now -- serial trilogies or sometimes quartets, that would wrap up one plotline in a trilogy and then continue the other plotlines in the next trilogy

I don't think it can be denied that even then we weren't made to wait more than half a decade for the next volume, with the only possible exceptions being the ones I outlined above.

Again, if it were just a matter of wanting the ending of this not particularly subtle but giant fairy tale, that's done. Martin has explained what the ending is going to be throughout the series and the t.v. show will give you the visual detailed version of it in what was to be two, now going to be three years. That will happen if George dies tomorrow. So it's not an issue, with this slice of fans, of getting the ending -- not anymore anyway. It's their -- your -- belief that Martin is withholding from you and that he has no right to struggle with these books and delay your reading them. It's not a reasonable demand. And believe me, again, I've heard all the arguments as to why it is somehow a reasonable demand when it came to Dragons. The dissections of every scrap of information, the insistence that if Martin just did things this way or talked to the fans that way, that it would somehow make it all better, when nothing made it all better -- not even the publication of Dragons -- there's something very different culturally going on here than just the completion of a story. It's kind of like Martin is seen as writing a holy series and he's failing their faith or something.

From the perspective of readers, what we have are multiple authors who release pretty regularly, with some small gaps of three or four years, five years on the outside, and one author who released five books over 15 years. Again, I remind you this series is 20 years old. 20 years and only five books. What other author has done this?

Again, some real perspective; A Game of Thrones was released the year I graduated from High School. I am now almost 39 and have teenage children. And in that time Martin has released 5 volumes of his books. Sure, other series have been going just as long or longer (I was 12 when EOTW was released and a father twice over by the time Jordan passed on) but Jordan released volumes of his books regularly and never acted as if it was a chore because he loved to write.

You don't want to invoke Werthead, since he's got the same view I have.

So...because he and I have a relatively minor disagreement about this one subject I can't quote his research? That's like saying you can't study the Bible unless you're a Christian (and that is the last thing I will say about religion in this thread). Wert and I agree on much more than we disagree on, and his research into the history of fantasy is thorough and entertaining.

Which is why he did that detailed timeline above that showed the gaps aren't as big and unreasonable as you're trying to invoke. Which you largely ignored.

I didn't ignore them, but he included all the time Martin spent prepping to write this series. To be blunt, readers don't care. Most of us hadn't read Martin at all prior and many of us didn't even read the first volume of the series for a few years after it was released. As I mentioned previously, I started reading in 2003. Martin prepping to write a series no one had read yet or even heard was being planned is only important if you're writing a history on Martin's career. It isn't as if we were waiting with baited breath the minute we heard he was writing a fantasy series. No, we only started caring once volumes started being released. Martin could have taken 30 years to plan it out; wouldn't have mattered because the reader only cares once he starts reading.

And seventy percent of horror is fantasy fiction. Fantasy horror is actually part of the fantasy field and fantasy fans read it regularly.

Pretty sweeping statement to make. I know plenty of fantasy readers who don't read horror. I do, but in many conversations I've had, I'm the odd man out. Ditto when I talk to horror fans; I'm often the only one in the conversation who reads fantasy.

But even if that were not the case, the Dark Tower series is not horror -- it's dark fantasy, and the first parts were published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Yes, but it was written by a man thought of by the general populace as a horror writer. Again, perception matters.

And it was fantasy fans who were obsessed with the Dark Tower books and bugged King about finishing them and whined about delays

That seems kinda presumptuous. How do you know it was just fantasy fans and not King fans in general? Again, most of the people I've talked to that read King and horror in general aren't huge fantasy fans.

Martin mostly doesn't write series either. He was best known for SF before Song.

This is actually true, so I'll concede that point. However, it doesn't change the fact that Martin chose to write these series in a genre known for its giant books and serial stories, and that it felt like the first three came out in reasonable amounts of time (yes, I know he already had much of them written) while King primarily writes stand-alones and is generally known for a genre in which stand-alones happen more often than serials.

And King did in fact plot out the first novellas of Tower and did eventually plan out the other books.

Only once he'd written the first one. And he didn't follow much of it. And when he started the last three books he was essentially starting from scratch.

Are you really? Because I don't think you are. You are continually comparing Martin to other authors and saying if they did this, why can't he write like they did.

I started this because you kept saying that Martin was not a stand-out, other than in how long the books were. You insisted that these kinds of delays happen all the time but it's only Martin we take to task for it. You also stated that his books were uncommonly large, even compared to other massive tomes in this genre. I started the comparisons to show that no, most authors don't take as long as Martin does, and compared story length because you said Martin's books were soooo much bigger and I was showing that they were about average.

That seems to indicate that you think the process for each author and each work those authors do should go the same about the same rate.

Nope. But let's compare it to gym class running track. It's not a race, just laps (he says, knowing this analogy will cause Kat to remind him it's not a race). A few students are practically Olympic quality, others aren't that fast but still plenty fast, others can run fast but have to stop or walk for longer periods of time and then there's one student who's lagging so far behind one could be forgiven for thinking he'd just stopped running all together. In fact, he's sitting on the sidelines and doesn't seem all that interested in getting up. Would the coach be remiss in being concerned about that? Even if the kid insists he's going to get up any moment and rejoin the run?

Because otherwise, why compare them at all? If they're all different, then comparisons don't mean anything, do they? And yet, you are continually making them. But if we compare on delays, you're brushing other delays off as not comparable. So it's a bit biased.

Again, they're all different, yet Martin still stands out. And no, it's not that we hold Martin to a different standard and only bug him for lags. It's that he's one of only three or four that have these kinds of lags, and his lags are longer than the other lags, generally, and his lags have gotten longer each time.

Again, you are talking to someone who was right there with you and Wert from 2005 to 2011. Heck, I was on your side of this debate right up until the closing months of 2014. You keep talking about the reactions while waiting for Dance, I'm saying that I was patient and loyal for a long enough time that eventually I got tired of what felt like making excuses.

Yeah, well other people didn't see it that way (a bit of a spill over of attitude from the Martin experience.) A few of them attacked him for it anyway (though not thankfully on the scale of Song,) and attacked him earlier for not talking to them about what the hold up was.

Wait...I thought only Martin got attacked, and maybe Stephen King.

And your assumption that Martin hasn't had depression and other life events that have gotten in the way, that the promotion obligations are slight and unimportant, etc. shows again a lot less patience and understanding with Martin than you're offering other authors who have less on their plates.

I'll admit, I've wondered about that, but Martin has spoken about his health, assuring us that everything is fine and telling us "f--- you" for even asking. While he was mainly referring to his physical health, one would assume that if there were emotional health issues happening, he would have taken that opportunity to at least say "I do have some issues keeping me from writing, but I'd prefer not to discuss them", or words to that effect (I know people who are clinically depressed don't tend to want to talk about it in public, but then, they also don't do a ton of public interviews, the way Martin tends to).

So again, this is not a matter of people being understanding and then losing patience.

But it is with me. You like to lump me in with large groups.

And second, Martin never promised you a book either. He promised that he'd try to write the Song of Ice and Fire series, which is all any author can do.

I refer you back to the unspoken understanding mentioned in this thread. Most authors don't leave their audiences hanging if it can at all be avoided. If it was as common as you want us to believe it is, I'd just never read serial fiction of any kind. I'm not one of those "I don't buy until all the volumes are out" kind of people, but I often do hold off on reading until the series is over (which is why I have a shelf full of books I have yet to read).

Actually, they are really large, even for epic fantasy.

So above you accused me of ignoring data. Now you're doing it. I proved conclusively that Martin's books, compared with Jordan's, Erikson's and Sanderson's largest, were average. And that's just among the authors I was naming (since you said he was long even compared to them). There are a ton of 350-grand plus epics in fantasy. They're starting to get smaller now (some of them, anyway) but even many released today are that long or longer.

And second again, see, you're comparing his writing output to the other authors. That's not acknowledging that authors or their works are different.

I was saying that I don't accept the length of Martin's books as an excuse. Wert specifically stated that the length of his books was one reason they took so long to produce. I'm saying I don't buy it.

A Song of Ice and Fire is an incredibly complicated story logistically and to some degree emotionally.

As is a significant chunk of epic fantasy.

But again, if those constraints are brought up, they are always waved away. Martin should be able to produce the books because you want them in the time that you declare reasonable based on the output of entirely other authors and your own feelings rather than it being Martin with his brain and circumstances.

No, I just wonder why Martin seems to be one of only a tiny fraction that can't. Again, the only author currently writing who seems to be taking as long as Martin is Patrick Rothfuss, who I'm also annoyed with, but since I've only read the first volume, it affects me less.

Yeah, and he's not going to say anything about it because of what happened with him talking about Dragons. People threatened him when he talked about the writing and problems. That's how bad it was. So no, you don't get to know what problems he has with writing Winter. And frankly, you have no right to know what problems ANY author is having with their work. Again, it's not a reasonable demand, unless you are their publisher partner.

I'm not demanding Martin tell us all his problems. I just wonder why he seems to be a standout when it comes to long lags, and despite all your claims, he is a standout. I don't expect him to tell me. I also don't really expect the series will get finished, which is why, as I said back when I restarted this thread, I have essentially given up worrying about when they're going to be released and have taken a mindset that they probably won't be. I wasn't gonna say much more, but I felt like your initial response should be addressed, and several of the statements that have been made are not 100% accurate. I also felt like I was being lumped in with the mob that was leaping down his throat as early as 2006.

Yes, it might. Because it's a big honking complicated series and because a ton in it

I've already detailed why I don't buy that excuse.

has changed from what he originally envisioned.

And again, he left us with the impression that he'd gotten past the biggest issue and that he wouldn't have to take as long again.

Again, the assumption that you know better how to write the series coming from his brain is the weird thing.

When did I assume that? I've never said anything remotely like that.

Again, things have changed in the course of writing the series. This faith you have that an overall outline is magic is strange.

You compared Stephen King to Martin, and I said that while Martin knew from the outset where he wanted to go with this series, King did not. Also, Martin himself said that he now knew what he was going to do for the last two books when he got Dance out to us, and stated that he didn't think it would take him as long. All I'm doing is saying he made some statements that turned out to be wrong, and yes, it's disappointing.

I don't want you or anyone else thinking that I'm daily heading over to westeros.org (I don't even have an account there) or other message boards and foaming at the mouth about how long it's taking. I don't visit finishthebookgeorge.com or whatever it's called. I don't devote a whole lot of thought to it, honestly. The whole reason we're having this conversation is that I was going through my old thread history, and I saw this thread title and couldn't remember what I'd said. I found it amusing that in 2008 I thought "the worst" scenario would be that Dance wouldn't get released until 2009 and that I would be 37 before the series was finished. 38-year-old me found that hilarious and had to comment. Then you responded and it escalated and here we are.

Or the t.v. show, which will give you a version in line with the outline and give you the end in three years -- and which has all of Martin's outline and notes.

But has deviated significantly from Martin's narrative. Again, the books are the real story. The TV show is a bonus. I didn't watch the TV series in hopes it would replace the books. The series has made some pretty major missteps, even as good as it is, and cannot be considered an adequate replacement.

Martin whined about not wanting anyone else to do it long before the t.v. show existed and at a very different point in the process.

As far as I know he still doesn't want anyone to finish the novels were he to die before doing so himself.

And yet that long ago statement of Martin's under different circumstances is treated as holy writ and routinely invoked with anger by a slice of the fans. So again, you aren't worried about having the end of the series. This is anger directly at Martin for not being able to perform how people demand he perform. It's a much more complicated cultural response than angst over a story in a series.

I wouldn't call it anger. More like disappointment. Martin at this point feels like that friend everyone has that keeps borrowing money and never giving it back. "But you didn't loan Martin money and he doesn't owe you anything!" Well, hear me out.

In the past I've had a friend borrow money, and because they're a friend, I've told them no rush to pay me back. Compare this to how I have spent money a lot of things related to the books and TV series; I have bought the prequel collection (and I already had Legends and Dreamsongs), the resource books, blurays of all the seasons released, t-shirts, I even have drinking glasses and a coffee mug with various great houses of Westeros on them. I have bought the books twice; I bough them again when Dance came out so that my set would match. So I feel the analogy is apt. Martin has given me nothing; I've paid for every inch of it. I didn't have to, but then, I didn't have to loan my friend money. Similar to how I liked my friend, I liked what Martin had already back when I'd only spent a little money on him.

And in response, I get told "just a little bit longer" year after year. In keeping with the analogy, I still think of him as my friend, even though I don't talk to him much anymore. If one day he pays me back in full, I'll gladly accept, even be happy about it, but at this point I've stopped expecting any return on my investment, and I have a feeling that if I ever get it, I won't feel like it was as solid an investment as it initially seemed. Like if that friend promised me that the reason he needed the money was to invent a time machine and that I would be repaid with interest, but in the end the time machine didn't work and I never got my interest.

Well you have Expanse from Abraham and Franck, which is quite a good t.v. series. And Lynch, Abercrombie and Sykes have all been optioned (at least I think I heard that Sykes was optioned, can't swear on it.)

A movie based on Tome of the Undergates would be amazing. The book had a good plot even if I was often exasperated with Sykes's writing. A movie would fix that. And I like Expanse but it's SF, which I'm not nearly as into. Lynch and Abercrombie series should be easy to pitch, since for a while it seemed like every network wanted their own Game of Thrones. I can see the pitches now: "It's like Game of Thrones but with more sword-play!" "It's like Game of Thrones but with less royals and more thieves...set in a place like Venice!" I know that's laughably inaccurate, but you know that's how the pitches would go. I mean, D&D had to pitch Game of Thrones by comparing it to LOTR, which it's nothing like.

That one would be expensive. But it's entirely possible that it's been optioned too. Chris does movies too, screenwriting, and so I think there were plans.

More expensive than Firefly? And if they do it as movies instead, it would be quite easy to produce.

I never said that. I just said that it's not all the fantasy field. Like many who love epic fantasy, you started off talking about Hollywood not liking epic fantasy (unless it was YA and/or t.v. which didn't count apparently,) and then started saying that Hollywood didn't like fantasy for film in general, unless it was YA (which doesn't count apparently.)

Nope, didn't say they "don't count". I said that Hollywood seems to be more at ease with them. YA they like because they know kids will drag their parents to see it. UF or other more modern-day-set fantasy they like because it's cheaper to produce and doesn't feel as "niche". There's still a mindset that fantasy films will flop. The main reason they have flopped up until now is that the film makers behind them don't really care about them. They're badly written, badly acted and at best they're visual effects extravaganzas, but even there, the effects can often look stupid. Case in point; I saw Warcraft this past weekend. I can only imagine how awesome that film would have been if it had a decent script.

Epic fantasy is less liked for film than it is for t.v. now, no question.

Where it's often stuck with less than half the budget it needs.

That's directly related to the cost of special effects re how Hollywood does film budgets, the unease that epic fantasy series loved by Americans are going to sell to the critical foreign box office and get the U.S. fans to turn out in big enough numbers, and the belief that they can build a cult following for a t.v. series over time with folk who haven't read the books easier than getting them to pony up money for a movie. How right those concerns are is not the issue. If Cameron wants to do a fantasy-like space opera story in space with Avatar, then they are counting on Cameron to bring the audience in. Lord of the Rings was big enough to be worth the work when costs for effects got cheaper.

Here's what kills me, though. Each year we get major big-budget films. Most of them don't have built-in fan bases, and even the ones that do don't have big enough fan bases to warrant big budgets all on their own. Movies like The Martian, Gravity, Inception, Avatar, 2012, Hancock or 300 did not come with built-in fan bases big enough to warrant the amount of money spent to make them, or in some cases any fan base at all. I know many of them were made by A-list directors and/or starred big name actors, but why can't that be the case for epic fantasy? Heck, we've even had at least one other fantasy series do well, aside from Lord of the Rings and other stuff aimed at teens; the Pirates of the Caribbean films. I mean, those were clearly fantasy. They were period. They were expensive. They were based on a freakin' ride. And they were hits. The only thing that sets them apart from most of the kinds of epic fantasy I'm talking about is that they were not really "sec world". Why, if Pirates can be successful, would something like Aeon's Gate not be?

Another issue is the adaptation scripts -- finding someone who will do it right and who knows how to do it, understands the material, can be harder with epic fantasy than science fiction.

True, but if it can be done for "mainstream" adaptations, I think it can be done with genre material.

You mean the Will Smith movie that flopped and probably resulted in them not wanting to pay him a big fee to be in Independence Day 2?

Are you talking about Wild, Wild West? Because that movie is more than a decade old and Smith's had many hits since then. Smith is still considered a bankable star. I'm not saying I want him head-lining an epic fantasy film, I mainly just used his name as an example of a name that will sell a movie all on its own.

And I just realized that you might have meant After Earth. I think most people understood the bigger problem there was trying to build a movie around Jayden Smith, not Will. Remember what Connery said; Hollywood allows three bombs for every hit. Will Smith is hardly having a bad time right now.

Oh, you're arguing for Krull and Legend to be seen as masterpieces of cinema, are you? (I will spot you Tim Curry.)

Absolutely not. I was including them in films that were badly acted, written, et al.

Krull and Legend were both low budget B-movies.

Which was sorta my point, but my understanding is that they were not marketed as B-movies. I thought they were attempts to cash in on a perceived desire for fantasy films, but because they were so dumb, they flopped, and convinced Hollywood no one wants to watch fantasy movies unless it's purely for kids.

Yes, because it was the freaking Lord of the Rings. It was like Superman or Star Trek. It is internationally beloved.

Jackson had to fight to get it made. He was initially told that he had to deliver the entire thing as a single film, not the proposed two he was pitching, because fantasy is a hard sell.

And even then, it took thirty years of development hell, Jackson setting up his own industrial complex and way of doing special effects, massive tax breaks from New Zealand, and an incredibly complicated set up of rights that is still going through lawsuits, plus years to pull off. It could have gone badly.

There you go. A number of film makers prior to Jackson wanted to make it, including Excalibur director John Boorman.

At the time, no he couldn't. Johnson was known as a wrestler then, not proven much as an actor.

But he was an incredibly popular wrestler, and the film was a spin-off from the successful Mummy franchise.

Abercrombie has a shot.

I sure hope so.

 

[KatG]

Wow this thread just keeps on giving (I like to picture KatG banging her head on her desk repeatedly everytime she reads a reply)

At this point, it's more of a fascinating cultural anthropology study.

the moaning only kicked into hyperdrive around the time he told fans to F*OFF.

As I said, the moaning was well underway right after A Storm of Swords was out and went into hyperdrive after Feast of Crows was published in 2005. Only by a contingent of fans, but very loud fans on the Internet. It has had absolutely nothing to do with Martin's words to fans. When Martin hasn't given information, he's been lambasted for it. When he has, he's been lambasted for it. It's not about Martin's behavior or even delays in the books at this point -- it's just become a long personal attack on the guy that is fueled over a sense that for this particular story, horrible crimes have been committed because the author had problems writing some of the series. Martin has never told all his fans to ef off. He did say that word to those people and media who were talking about how he was fat and sick and would have a heart attack and die before finishing the series during one interview. And that's frankly real understandable. He has joked about his situation, including the Z Nation cameo, but that's in sympathy with his fans. It's not like he doesn't know people would like him to finish. He's been remarkable patient with most of his fans. Given the unprecedented harassment and hostility that has come at him by some of those fans, he's been a lot more patient than I would have been.

Combined with his notablog post on everything other than how the writings going,

Again, he eventually had to do that because when he began the blog, it was when Feast came out and some people were basically harassing him, and whatever he said, some fans got deeply upset. It became easiest to just not talk to the fans about the process because they had let's call them unrealistic expectations about what he was doing. It's not about having a "work ethic" because writing the series is not about showing up on time and shoveling stuff out. It's about creating reams and reams of coordinated text from one's brain. And people don't seem to understand that doing that is not simply a matter of concentrating really hard and doing nothing else in life. Gaiman and other authors have tried to explain it, but that contingent of fans doesn't want to hear it and is convinced it can't be true, at least where Song is concerned.

But for Martin to tell all of us to f--- off regardless, he turned a bunch of apologists, like me, into the very people he assumed we already were.

Except that he hasn't done that to all of his fans. He got angry at inappropriate harassment about his health. Otherwise, he's actually had a terrific relationship with most of his fans. But there's a slice that keeps talking about how Martin hates them one way or another, and that Martin is a slovenly, lazy asshole -- who they desperately want these books from. That's what I mean -- the anger doesn't seem to have much to do with him simply struggling to write the series. They have to make up elaborate psychologies for why Martin is an awful person who doesn't love them enough.

I did get irritated at how Martin would excitedly announce this or that he was working on and none of it was Dance. I kept wondering why he expected us to get excited over the re-release of a children's book or collection of stories he edited when he all knew what we really wanted from him.

First off, other people were actually interested in those projects. Wild Cards in fact has a very passionate following, which is one reason Martin has kept doing them, which has helped out a lot of other authors trying to make it in the field. Second, he was working on Dragons at the time of those other projects and published it. It just took him a bit because of the book itself. Other projects did not keep him from working on Dragons. It very seldom works that way. And that's the unreasonable side -- the demand is not simply that he try to finish the book because we'd like to read it. The demand is first off that people are sure they know what goes into trying to finish the book and should get to dictate to him about that without knowing how he's actually writing, that they should know what he does when all the time as if he's a criminal they are monitoring, that he must produce the books on a schedule they feel is reasonable, no matter what he is actually dealing with and what work is going on between him and his publisher. That's not reality. It's like someone with a conspiracy theory.

And third, neither you nor I are apologists for Martin because he doesn't have anything to apologize for. Having trouble writing a particular novel is not a crime or a mean act against anybody. This is the problem. He isn't delaying to spite fans. And yet on this one particular series, there is a slice of fans who view a very normal thing that happens in fiction as a personal attack on them. And you've joined them. So yeah, I am going to lump you in with not the harassers but the despairing complainers when you're using their same rhetoric. Not because I think you're a nasty person, but you have joined in the chorus of unreasonable demand. (While I fully understand it comes out of disappointment.)

You mean fans contacting King repeatedly over the years wondering when, or if, he'd ever continue that series?

Oh yeah, constantly. And they kept bugging his publisher about when the reissues of the first parts of the series were being brought out and being upset when they weren't being reissued sooner. But it didn't get quite so nasty until again Internet culture developed, and so it did not reach the heights it has with Martin, and that may be because it really didn't occur to fans back in the 1980's and 1990's that they could attack an author for the crime of not creating works of fiction on demand.

The reaction was a bit more calm, I grant you, but this was because A) King didn't give the appearance of sitting around doing nothing; he released several other books over the years and B) He never told fans to f--- off.

You just said that you were pissed off when Martin told you he was doing stuff other than Song, but when King was doing other stuff than Dark Tower -- for more than a decade -- that wasn't a horrible crime against the fans but instead a perfectly reasonable explanation for the delay. You noting the hypocrisy here? And King "doing other stuff" was not the reason that The Dark Tower books got delayed, and why Cook hasn't written the last two Black Company novels. They got delayed for the same reason Martin's books have been delayed -- King and Martin both had to figure out the story and figure out writing the story, and that takes time sometimes and often gaps while things jell. Also, King has told various fans to F off many times, and Martin did it once to a particular group of fans and media who were ragging on his physical condition like they owned him. So give a rest.

Did it take over 20 years to complete? Did its readers start as teens and have teenage children of their own still waiting for the next volume?

See, again, you don't see authors as different. You don't see various books as different -- unless it serves you lambasting Martin. That Tolkien took 12 years to write The Lord of the Rings, which was desired as a sequel to The Hobbit, you'll fob off. That Rowling managed to complete her much shorter Harry Potter series in ten years means Martin did something bad because he's struggled with books in his series. In reality, neither of these authors has anything to do with Martin's writing.

But I fully expected that now that he'd gotten over the hump, the next two volumes would come at a quicker rate.

Yeah, and that's the nub. Your expectations have nothing to do with Martin and reality. They're simply what you want.

Of course I'll have less of an issue with gaps I wasn't around to experience.

The problem is that you have an ISSUE with anyone having gaps in a series. That shouldn't be an issue because it's not something that fiction authors can help. They aren't having gaps to spite you. There is not one okay set of circumstances for one author having a gap or delay in a series and other sets being not okay. That you are around to experience a gap delay in a series is actually not a problem of the series' author. You are trying to make Martin responsible for you and your expectations. He isn't responsible.

You have a choice -- wait for the books if Martin manages them, or stop reading the series. That's it.

I think a lot of Black Company fans feel like I do; that what we have is plenty.

Black Company is a multi-part series -- the full saga of the Black Company with a long, continuous war. The first trilogy isn't really a trilogy. It's just the first set of battles, equivalent to ending at A Clash of Kings. It ends some storylines, but not the set of wars with sorcerers that the Black Company juggles. And reality is that Cook has taken sixteen years and counting to write one book. Which is fine with me, but you are only interested in insisting authors are alike when it serves your purposes to say Martin did you wrong. Not when it shows authors sometimes take a long time to do books.

You don't care about the Black Company saga and finding out what happens, even though Cook has an outline. So we're all not supposed to be upset at Cook. But you do care about Martin's Song and are obsessed that he had a general outline. So we're all supposed to be upset at Martin because you are upset. You weren't that upset before, so you didn't think that those who were upset about Dragons were being fair. But now you're upset too because Martin didn't do things the way you think he should do them on Winter, even though you don't know what is actually going on. So we're supposed to go along with being upset now too. Doesn't work like that. What you want is irrelevant to what is. What you care about does not then make it reasonable for other people. Just because you have a new set of demands does not mean that Martin can or should conform to them.

Because a lot of issues that existed then don't now. And the audience is larger now. In the 70's, fantasy was a niche market of a niche market. Now it's a viable market of its own. Fantasy readers in the 70's were happy to have anything to read at all, or at least that's what I've gathered, or read just as much SF as they did F and therefore had plenty to read.

Okay, this one does have me banging my head against the desk. Again, supposed changes in the market have nothing to do with Martin -- they are not his problem. If some fans have different expectations about what they want, that's their problem. Fantasy was not a niche market ever. It's always been one of the most popular forms of fiction. The fantasy category book market -- which is not fantasy fiction in toto but a form of bookselling -- was indeed launched in the 1960's by publishers making up the science fiction category book market -- both of which were mainly in North America. It was mainly a housekeeping reorganization in bookselling -- fantasy books had been sold under/as SF often, but there was really no need to keep doing that, so they simply stopped, but the imprints remained SFF imprints, which sometimes also did horror. Fantasy fans were numerous and had plenty of fantasy fiction to read for decades. Fantasy readers in the 1970's had tons to read in fantasy and fantasy horror and even fantasy romance, in both short and long form, followed by even more with the tie-in books. Thousands and thousands of mass market paperbacks in fantasy and science fiction were put out, sold mainly to the wholesale market with not that much author promotion directly, and often sold a lot more than most of the titles being put out today. The idea that fantasy fiction was a desert until The Sword of Shannara was published is a myth that does not match the facts. Nobody waited around patiently for series to finish because that's all they had. That's silly.

From the perspective of readers, what we have are multiple authors who release pretty regularly, with some small gaps of three or four years, five years on the outside, and one author who released five books over 15 years. Again, I remind you this series is 20 years old. 20 years and only five books. What other author has done this?

Again, you are stating here with this argument that authors aren't different and Martin's output must be measured by other authors' output. But again, other authors' output has nothing to do with Martin's work on Song. As long as you keep offering this up, you're not dealing with reality. And when we have talked about authors with long delays, (even though this again has nothing to do with Martin, but does provide the evidence you keep asking for,) you've tried to brush them off. If X author can do this, why can't Martin has nothing to do with actual fiction writing.

So...because he and I have a relatively minor disagreement about this one subject I can't quote his research?

You can totally quote his research. With the understanding that some of it is wrong or incomplete and that a lot of the rest of it does not back up what you're saying about Martin. Which is why I referenced the post Wert did in this thread which you have ignored. And if it's a minor disagreement, why have we kept having this long conversation?

I didn't ignore them, but he included all the time Martin spent prepping to write this series.

Yes, because that's part of writing the books. As has been time that had to be spent prepping Crows and Dragons and prepping now Winter further with the changes that occurred in the writing of the series, causing delays. That prepping is part of the writing (and struggling,) and shows also that the gaps haven't really increased, as does the overlap issue with writing the books for Martin. But since those facts don't support your demands as reasonable, you want to junk them. But to Wert and me, those facts actually show the real amount of time Martin takes in writing the books. The publication dates alone do not. That was the point, T.

I'll admit, I've wondered about that, but Martin has spoken about his health, assuring us that everything is fine and telling us "f--- you" for even asking. While he was mainly referring to his physical health, one would assume that if there were emotional health issues happening, he would have taken that opportunity to at least say "I do have some issues keeping me from writing, but I'd prefer not to discuss them", or words to that effect (I know people who are clinically depressed don't tend to want to talk about it in public, but then, they also don't do a ton of public interviews, the way Martin tends to).

First off, you have no right to any information about his physical or emotional health. It's none of your business. You don't own the man and he doesn't work for you. (And same with Scott Lynch -- that he was forced in part by harassment to talk about his depression was a bad thing.) Second, you seriously do not understand how bad it got with people harassing Martin. His making a statement about personal issues, whatever that statement might be, would be used as another excuse to attack him. This is what we are talking about as unprecedented. This is again a minority slice of so-called fans, but Martin has to deal with levels of harassment that are usually only reserved for trying to drive women off-line. Again, this is part of the unreasonable Internet culture where demands that authors never faced before are claimed to be justified. They are not. Which is why an exasperated F you to people insulting and attacking him over his own health and weight (and on this particular point Jordan's death seems to be a factor in those attacks,) is not at all surprising.

I refer you back to the unspoken understanding mentioned in this thread. Most authors don't leave their audiences hanging if it can at all be avoided.

The unspoken understanding is a piece of crap. It's just another justification for shouting at an author. Martin is trying to finish the series. He is not trying to leave his audience hanging. He's just not performing the way you're demanding he perform because the series has to come out of his brain. Which is your problem. That some fans believe the author whose writing they love is insincere in trying to finish the series, that they believe he has contempt for them, etc. is a set of made-up assumptions. And no matter what you say to those people, they will not be satisfied. They were not satisfied whatever was said about Dragons, and even when Dragons came out, they were not satisfied and talked on the Internet about how awful a person Martin is presumed to be. If you think he's that incompetent, insincere, and unreasonably slow, again, stop reading the series. But if you think he's a good author whose work you like, you have to wait for him to be able to do that work.

To be blunt, readers don't care...Martin could have taken 30 years to plan it out; wouldn't have mattered because the reader only cares once he starts reading.

Some readers don't care. And so they make unreasonable demands not based on facts. And again, that some readers have this attitude is not Martin's problem.

Ditto when I talk to horror fans; I'm often the only one in the conversation who reads fantasy.

Again, most of horror is fantasy fiction, so horror fans are also fantasy readers usually, unless they have very narrow tastes. And lots of fantasy fans read horror and dark fantasy too. Horror is a frequent element in fantasy fiction. But I still don't get where you are going with this. King writes horror, science fiction and fantasy. Martin writes science fiction, horror and fantasy. Are you trying to say that because King became a phenom with fantasy horror, the fantasy fans who wanted one of his biggest works, Dark Tower, should totally have been okay with delays or something? Because they were not, as mentioned above.

There are a ton of 350-grand plus epics in fantasy.

Yes there are. Epic fantasy series usually run around the 500-600 page mark. Martin writes books that are a thousand pages long for Song. So that's two average epic fantasy books per book -- ten books from five. A handful of epic fantasy books are in the thousand page ranges, but publishers don't do it that often because they can't afford it. Martin had to cut books and find natural ending points to stories for it because his publishers couldn't do the books as one volume past a certain size because of pricing and production issues. The books are effing long and have a much larger cast than again all but a handful of epic fantasy series. Which takes time to write them.

I was saying that I don't accept the length of Martin's books as an excuse. Wert specifically stated that the length of his books was one reason they took so long to produce. I'm saying I don't buy it.

Yes, because in reality, a really long book that is two average epic fantasy books can take time to produce. That you don't want to deal with that is again not Martin's problem. He doesn't have to give you excuses. It's your problem. He's trying to do something hard and sometimes it's taken him longer, especially when things changed in the series from the writing of it. That you're not okay with that is again your problem. It's not Martin being a bad or incompetent author.

I just wonder why he seems to be a standout when it comes to long lags, and despite all your claims, he is a standout.

Not as much of a one as people have argued, no. And even if he were, so what? That's not Martin trying to hurt you. It's him struggling with the series coming out of his brain. The answer to the wonderment is that Martin is Martin and he's trying to write the series he created.

I'm not demanding Martin tell us all his problems.

Yes, you have been. You just did it above, when you said he should report to fans about his mental health. Even though he was threatened with near violence. Even though anything he says provokes online harassment or is regarded as an ironclad promise that then he's clearly broken and so is a horrible person worthy of harassment and insults. He's dealing with that situation and you're ignoring it and keep asking, why won't he talk to fans about his writing on the Internet? And that's why. Because it freaked a contingent of fans out when he did and they're very difficult to deal with. Dealing with them would in fact keep him from writing Winter.

I also don't really expect the series will get finished, which is why, as I said back when I restarted this thread, I have essentially given up worrying about when they're going to be released and have taken a mindset that they probably won't be. I wasn't gonna say much more, but I felt like your initial response should be addressed, and several of the statements that have been made are not 100% accurate. I also felt like I was being lumped in with the mob that was leaping down his throat as early as 2006.

The behavior of the mob (which again started earlier than 2006,) varies widely. We don't have the harassers here at SFFWorld. We just had upset fans who kept arguing that it's perfectly reasonable that Martin is an awful person who no longer cares and clearly won't finish the series and we will never see Dragons, and other authors do it faster so why can't he be just like them, etc. And you are now doing the same rhetoric. I know you think that because you think he should be able to write Winter a certain way and hasn't that the rhetoric is now fair, but it's still not fair and has nothing to do with actual fiction writing or Martin. Even if Martin takes really long gaps (as long as Cook!) to get the last two books out, then that's what was necessary to get them out. I understand that it's a sad fact. It's still a fact.

And again, he left us with the impression that he'd gotten past the biggest issue and that he wouldn't have to take as long again.

That Martin hoped that Winter would go faster -- and still may since it's not been as long as Dragons -- does not mean that it would necessarily go faster. (There's that magical thinking again that anything Martin says about his hopes is an ironclad promise.) It has not gone faster, as it turns out. There are things he needs to work out. What he put into Dragons and Crows significantly changed the general outline for these last two books. What was going in to each book has continually shifted over the twenty-five years he's been working on this series.

When did I assume that? I've never said anything remotely like that.

Yeah, you have. That he has an outline so it should go faster (you know how he should write,) that he should produce pages in X number of years (you know how he should write,) etc. Instead of trying to micro-manage Martin, you're going to have to wait till he works it out himself.

You compared Stephen King to Martin,

No, I compared the fan reaction to delays of Dark Tower to fan reaction to delays of Song as talking about who came closest to the level of outrage re the furor over Song being highly unusual. You've been the one who insists on comparing how you think King is writing to how you think Martin is writing.

then you responded and it escalated and here we are.

No, I was joking around about calculations about finishing the series -- the topic of the thread. You kept insisting on rehashing the why it is unreasonable that Martin hasn't finished Winter yet arguments, which are almost exactly a replica of the Dragons arguments. And because I like you, I went through the whole thing again. And then we also had an extra discussion about epic fantasy in film. Don't put this one on me.

As far as I know he still doesn't want anyone to finish the novels were he to die before doing so himself.

He still doesn't want that, no. He's hoping to finish himself. It's his baby. But he gave permission to the t.v. series to finish the novels, so it doesn't really matter what Martin wants now. He'll be dead. The books will be finished if he hasn't finished them.

Well, hear me out.

You are going to re-hash every Dragons bit, aren't you? Martin didn't ask you for money as a loan. He didn't even ask you to buy his books. He created a work of literature, a copy of which could be bought. You decided to buy it and in what form that was produced. (I.e. people who watch the HBO show are choosing to pay for HBO and watch the show there. You could also have just gotten out the books from the public library for free or bought used copies for cheap.) And in return for your money, you got a book. That's all you were owed for your money -- the product you bought that Martin was able to create, and that's all anyone can guarantee (Martin's publisher could go out of business but still own the license for one thing.) That's how books work. The author puts out the product -- the book. And you buy the book. That's it. The author could drop dead the next day. (And the t.v. show could have been cancelled.) You get to read the book you bought and be entertained by the book, maybe even re-read it and be entertained again. So loaning a friend money and getting nothing in return is not a comparable analogy, although you are not at all the first to try that one.

I'll do the movie one in a separate post. And next post in this conversation, since we've already covered the old dust-ups, I'll just make a simpler statement.

 

[KatG]

OK, Hollywood:

I said that Hollywood seems to be more at ease with them. YA they like because they know kids will drag their parents to see it. UF or other more modern-day-set fantasy they like because it's cheaper to produce and doesn't feel as "niche".

Basically. But that was the case back in the 1980's as well.

There's still a mindset that fantasy films will flop.

No, you're talking about a mindset that EPIC fantasy sword & sorcery films will flop, not all of fantasy. And there is not a mindset that they will flop. They are just seen as less certain to be hits, with more difficulties to doing them well without huge budgets. And their view of sword & sorcery fantasy includes things like 300 and Hercules, not just sec world stuff.

The main reason they have flopped up until now is that the film makers behind them don't really care about them.

Krull and Legend also flopped back in the 1980's. They became cult movies later through video and t.v. A lot of low budget and mid-budget movies flop. They get less distribution. The Scorpion King made a decent profit and it did not have a brilliant script. And Warcraft just pulled in over $300 million on the first weekend, which is nearly double their reported budget, so now they'll be turning a nice profit. Essentially, the movie is a hit, though not a runaway one. But definitely in line with YA SFF films. Things don't always hit or miss based on perceived quality of script.

Where it's often stuck with less than half the budget it needs.

They can get decent budgets. And they get to go much, much longer and build up an audience over time. They get more merchandising, syndication and streaming reruns, and t.v. series are seen by more people than individual movies. So it's a trade-off. Hollywood is very pushy about film scripts. They ride film directors. In t.v., they actually get to experiment more, so you can get a better adaptation.

Here's what kills me, though. Each year we get major big-budget films. Most of them don't have built-in fan bases,

Actually, most of them do or are reboots of properties that do. That's why they keep doing sequels and reboots. The comic book movies all have built-in fan bases. The Fast & Furious franchise built one from the lower budget first film. Mission Impossible reboot from t.v. series with built-in fan base and name recognition, James Bond, Ghostbusters, etc.

Movies like The Martian, Gravity, Inception, Avatar, 2012, Hancock or 300 did not come with built-in fan bases big enough to warrant the amount of money spent to make them,

Actually The Martian and 300 had large built-in fanbases. The rest had A-list stars and directors like Cameron to justify the budgets.

why can't that be the case for epic fantasy?

It can be, but when it's a big epic fantasy film, it's expensive, so they aren't necessarily going to pony up for big name stars for them and screw the budget. (That's why Lord of the Rings didn't.) Even in the comic book movies -- Robert Downey Jr. wasn't that expensive the first Iron Man movie -- they took a chance on him. The Avengers -- none of those actors was that expensive or yet as big.

Heck, we've even had at least one other fantasy series do well, aside from Lord of the Rings and other stuff aimed at teens; the Pirates of the Caribbean films. I mean, those were clearly fantasy. They were period. They were expensive. They were based on a freakin' ride. And they were hits. The only thing that sets them apart from most of the kinds of epic fantasy I'm talking about is that they were not really "sec world". Why, if Pirates can be successful, would something like Aeon's Gate not be?

Again, there are lots of fantasy movies and many of them are hits but you are only interested in sword & sorcery pre-industrial secondary world epic-ish fantasy films and preferably adaptations. That's very specific. If Disney wanted to do Aeon's Gate and make an amusement park ride out of it and do massive merchandising and promotion for it as a Disney movie, then it might be a hit, toned down for PG-13. But it depends on a lot of factors. That's why a lot of options never go into development and a lot of projects linger in development hell.

Are you talking about Wild, Wild West?

No, I'm talking about After Earth, which he did with his son. It wasn't the worst SF movie in the world, actually. But it had a big budget and it flopped. So while he's had other hits recently (Focus,) they may have decided that they didn't need him for what he would cost. But for whatever reasons they did it, I think it was a big mistake. Probably make money anyway, though. And they got Jeff, so that will make the sequel to one of the silliest SF movies bearable perhaps.

Which was sorta my point, but my understanding is that they were not marketed as B-movies.

Well Krull actually did have a big budget -- I was wrong on that -- but the distribution was limited, especially as it then crashed. Legend was marketed as a B-movie. The Conan movies and Red Sonja were fairly big budget and marketed that way and were hits. Having a lot of fantasy movies geared towards a teen or kid audience came about because of the PG-13 rating system change in the 1980's. It affected all the movies. And Disney got their groove back then. The 1990's had more in the way of big SF movies because of Terminator, but there were fantasy hits like The Mummy and From Dusk till Dawn. But after the 1980's, the D&D craze had died down, at least on the media radar, and so there was less impetus to do sword & sorcery. Horror also took a bit of a hit till the later 90's.

Jackson had to fight to get it made. He was initially told that he had to deliver the entire thing as a single film, not the proposed two he was pitching, because fantasy is a hard sell.

Jackson didn't have to fight to get it made because no one thought it could be a big hit. He had to fight to get it made because they'd been trying to do it for a long time but had expense problems until the tech became easier and cheaper. They wanted one film because that cost less. Jackson wanted something incredibly huge and getting the financing was hard. The stuff that is going on now -- the massive let's do three or four movies -- they didn't do that as much back then and the global market wasn't the big issue. You did one, and then you made more. Jackson was proposing a Back to the Future type set-up, which would take years, keeping actors for years, etc. So it wasn't that it was epic fantasy that was the problem, other than the fact of the special effects and how do you have credible orcs, etc.

The oughts, they had Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and then all the comic book movies launched. Comics has advantages that have made it good for studios for big and mid-budget movies.

 

[ArtNJ]

There is such a thing as being too thorough in responding to each and every point a poster makes. Intelligent discourse, blah, blah, blah, sometimes you need to paraphrase, mischaracterize, and Trumpize. For example, "Kat, your posts prove you are an uber-beard-loving-fan-girl-extraordinaire. Stop trying to defend Martin's obsessive fascination with book signings, editing other people's junk and combing his beard! The South Park episodes prove Martin is a wacko! The book should be out by now! There is no defense!"

 

[DJ94122]

There is an interesting philosophical question here about what professionals "owe" the people who pay their salaries. Does a professional baseball player "owe" his fans his best effort every night? Does a doctor "owe" her patient perfect diagnoses and treatment every office visit? Does a janitor "owe" the building superintendents a spotless floor every shift? Are there moral obligations in addition to any legal ones? Where do we draw the line between perfection and simply doing "good enough?" After considering all of that, why is an author different than a baseball player whose fans will boo if he doesn't hustle?

Regardless, and I've said this before, but if we (i.e. the entertainment consuming public) keep paying for unfinished stories, then we'll keep getting unfinished stories. I don't think it does much good to blame Martin or Jordan or Cook or Rothfuss for taking forever to finish a series when we're the ones supporting the practice.

 

[farseer2]

Regardless, and I've said this before, but if we (i.e. the entertainment consuming public) keep paying for unfinished stories, then we'll keep getting unfinished stories. I don't think it does much good to blame Martin or Jordan or Cook or Rothfuss for taking forever to finish a series when we're the ones supporting the practice.

You are right about that but, at least speaking for myself, I would not like to end the practice of writing series. I hate reading the beginning of the story and then having to wait for the end, but I do like series and I understand that most writers need income during the process.

 

[Davis Ashura]

You are right about that but, at least speaking for myself, I would not like to end the practice of writing series. I hate reading the beginning of the story and then having to wait for the end, but I do like series and I understand that most writers need income during the process.

I actually have always preferred series rather than standalones. I think they (series) are simply more immersive, and that's a quality I want in a fantasy.
In terms of wait time, one thing Michael Sullivan does is to write the entire series out before releasing the first book. I imagine he tinkers with the follow up novels, but with him, you're pretty much guaranteed that the series is complete and any delays are likely on the publisher, not Michael.
That's a tactic I'm going to try to a certain extent with my next series.

 

[Raule]

I don't think I want to know how old I'll be when Martin finishes. Still alive, I hope.

Further, I can only speak to the subject as a reader. I don’t think authors have an obligation to readers to finish anything they start. However, with the long gap between each book, my interest has waned.

I don’t subscribe to HBO. I saw two episodes of season one when I was on vacation and watched the episodes at the hotel where I was staying. When Xfinity was offering free HBO during a trial period, I also watched a couple more episodes from other seasons. Now that the televised series has overtaken the book series and – as I understand it – diverged from it, I find my interest in reading the series has waned even further. I’ve also lost faith that Martin will be sticking with the original vision he had for the series when he wrote the first three books (books four and five were proof enough of that). The last book in particular felt like a choose your own adventure story in the sense that Martin has planted the seeds for nearly every possible outcome and theory. I might as well finish this series off in my own imagination as HBO is doing. I don’t see this as the same as bitching about Martin taking his time. He’s owes me nothing. But as a reader I’ve moved on and have plenty of other books to read and look forward to.

 

[Takoren]

Can I say before I start that I actually am getting tired of this? I have looked back over what I've been saying and realized I sound a great deal more angry and frustrated than I actually feel. Since 2011 I have read a number of other authors and found that I even appreciate some of them more than I do Martin. It has been ages since I've been to Martin's website, and I certainly don't check fantasy news pages day in and day out hoping that maybe this will be the day it's announced that Winds has been completed. I spend literally zero time worrying about this series, but this thread makes it look like that's all I care about. How easily one can misrepresent one's self online.

I don't want you to think I no longer care about the series. It still ranks among my favorites. And I still hope to read volumes 6 and 7. But when I looked back at this thread from 2008 and saw my younger self optimistically talking about having read the entire series before turning 40, it struck me as humorous, because I have quit waiting for the next ASOIAF book. There are other writers out there, and I'm having a good time with them. If Martin never finishes, so be it.

As I said, the moaning was well underway right after A Storm of Swords was out and went into hyperdrive after Feast of Crows was published in 2005. Only by a contingent of fans, but very loud fans on the Internet. It has had absolutely nothing to do with Martin's words to fans. When Martin hasn't given information, he's been lambasted for it. When he has, he's been lambasted for it. It's not about Martin's behavior or even delays in the books at this point -- it's just become a long personal attack on the guy that is fueled over a sense that for this particular story, horrible crimes have been committed because the author had problems writing some of the series. Martin has never told all his fans to ef off. He did say that word to those people and media who were talking about how he was fat and sick and would have a heart attack and die before finishing the series during one interview. And that's frankly real understandable. He has joked about his situation, including the Z Nation cameo, but that's in sympathy with his fans. It's not like he doesn't know people would like him to finish. He's been remarkable patient with most of his fans. Given the unprecedented harassment and hostility that has come at him by some of those fans, he's been a lot more patient than I would have been.

Well, again, I'm not part of that crowd. I was, and am, just as against them as you are. I'm part of the "given up" crowd. I have never in my life sent GRRM any form of personal communication asking him when he was going to be finished, demanding he finish soon, threatening or cajoling or declaring that I'm done with his sorry ass, or anything of the kind. And I can't say enough how wrong and evil it is that anyone would issue threats to GRRM over this, or really over anything.

Speaking as a fat man who is actually pretty healthy weight aside, I understand why he might get angry at fans who are sure his weight issues will kill him early, but many of the concerns were spurred more by James Rigney's death than Martin's actual health. Fans were concerned that Martin himself wasn't exactly a spring chicken. I think if I were ever in that position, I wouldn't be happy, but I wouldn't tell them literally "f--- you." Also, this isn't the only time Martin has had harsh words for his fans, not by a long shot.

And third, neither you nor I are apologists for Martin because he doesn't have anything to apologize for.

"Apologist" means "a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial". It has nothing to do with literal apologies. But as you have said there was a frothing mob hounding Martin to finish the books, and there was a contingent of fans telling the others to back off and let him work. That was the side I was on until recently. I didn't join the other side, though, I just started to hear how every defense of Martin's time frame I offered was starting to feel hollow in my own ears, and I just gave up. I didn't demand he finish, I just came to understand that this kind of lag really is not normal, no matter how much you and others insist it is, nor is it something I have to just accept. But instead of sending Martin nasty messages, I've just quite worrying about it and decided to move on to other authors. Again, this thread and comments I've made has made me seem like one of those angry fanboys, but in actual reality, I spend comparatively little time even worrying about it. It does miff me a bit that the TV series has surpassed the books and revealed some things Martin has not revealed yet (see "Hold the Door") but again, I'm less angry and more just resigned to the idea that the TV series ending may be the only one I get.

And yet on this one particular series, there is a slice of fans who view a very normal thing that happens in fiction as a personal attack on them

.
There is a slice of fans that doesn't view this sort of lag as a "very normal thing". I point out that you have yet to point out another 20-year-old series that only has five books yet supposedly has future volumes coming (except The Black Company, but again, that series went on for years producing new volumes with small gaps, and fans aren't exactly dying for more, feeling that what's been released is plenty; when I heard Cook had more planned volumes I was surprised).

And you've joined them.

I have not. I don't take what Martin has done personally, and as I said I have never once sent him any form of communication to diss him. In fact the one time I sent him any communications at all it wasn't even about ASOIAF but about real-world politics. I sent him one message, he replied, and that was the end of that.

So yeah, I am going to lump you in with not the harassers but the despairing complainers when you're using their same rhetoric. Not because I think you're a nasty person, but you have joined in the chorus of unreasonable demand. (While I fully understand it comes out of disappointment.)

Again, I'm not "demanding" anything. I've just decided that perhaps those who've said Martin isn't inspired anymore, doesn't really like writing this series anymore and is only continuing because he knows fans expect it just might be right. After all, even though he eventually released Dance, the book was a huge disappointment (to most) in which not much happens despite it being the second longest book in the series. I wasn't even all that displeased by it, yet I had to grant that it was an unfocused mess that seemed too concerned with adding yet more new characters and not at all focused on moving the plot forward at all.

Oh yeah, constantly. And they kept bugging his publisher about when the reissues of the first parts of the series were being brought out and being upset when they weren't being reissued sooner. But it didn't get quite so nasty until again Internet culture developed, and so it did not reach the heights it has with Martin, and that may be because it really didn't occur to fans back in the 1980's and 1990's that they could attack an author for the crime of not creating works of fiction on demand.

I think it occurred to people a long time ago. It just took more effort.

You just said that you were pissed off when Martin told you he was doing stuff other than Song

Annoyed, is what I said. But I shrugged it off.

but when King was doing other stuff than Dark Tower -- for more than a decade -- that wasn't a horrible crime against the fans but instead a perfectly reasonable explanation for the delay.

You seem to think I was perfectly okay with it. But note the stuff that Martin talked about on his blog and how happy and excited he was to announce the release of: collections of short stories he'd already written, a re-release of a children's novel he wrote in the 80's, a novel he co-wrote with two other authors. It was almost like he was saying "No, I'm not done. Won't be any time soon, but here's some of my back catalog to enjoy. Oh, and here's some stuff not related to ASOIAF at all that I worked on with some friends. Please, go read that and get off my back." I'm not saying that's the reality, but it was the impression left with many. It's only been the last couple of years that he released anything ASOIAF related (in Rogues and Dangerous Women). I don't count The Wit and Wisdom of Tyrion Lannister or The World of Ice and Fire as new material, btw, nor do I count A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Stephen King made us wait five years for volume 2 of The Dark Tower. In the meantime, we got seven full novels, two of which are undisputed classics. We only had to wait three and a half years for volume 3, and that was with King also doing his best to get sober. At that point he lost the plot and admitted to fans he didn't know where he was going with that series. Still, it was only another six years until the fourth volume (the longest he made us wait, and as long as Martin made us wait between two volumes now), and we got eight full novels in the meantime, many of which had direct ties to The Dark Tower. It was at that point that Constant Readers realized that The Dark Tower series was essentially the lynchpin of King's multiverse, and that every new novel advanced the story, even if only indirectly. Five years following the fourth volume, we got the final three volumes in one big dump. So, not only did he release substantially more new material, he only had one gap as long as Martin's last two (one of which we're still in), and his gaps didn't get progressively longer.

See, again, you don't see authors as different.

Yes, yes I do. See, the way you're characterizing my responses makes it sound like I'm saying:

"Brandon Sanderson can release two full novels a year. Martin should be able to do the same."

Not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that in a sub-genre (epic, medieval-esque fantasy) that includes dozens of authors, many of which are writing works as long as Martin's, it seems that Martin (and Rothfuss) are a breed apart; the ones who consistently are taking longer and longer to put out a product.

That Tolkien took 12 years to write The Lord of the Rings, which was desired as a sequel to The Hobbit, you'll fob off.

Apples and oranges. Tolkien didn't write The Hobbit as book 1 of a series, nor did he intend to write a sequel to it. He wanted to focus on The Silmarillion and other stuff, but there was substantial demand for a follow-up, and his publisher eventually got him to agree, but he had no idea what to do with it until he decided that Bilbo, the dwarves and Gandalf actually lived in the world he'd created for The Silmarillion, just in a different place and time. Then he decided the Necromancer mentioned in The Hobbit was Sauron from The Silmarillion and that helped him along, but he still didn't know how big the book was going to be when he began.

If the situations were comparable, Tolkien would have started his story with one book, gotten two more out in rapid succession, all of which were parts of one long story, then taken longer and longer to write the volumes that would finish the story. The Hobbit was self-contained, and didn't even call for a sequel, considering it ends with Bilbo living "happily ever after to the end of his days."

The problem is that you have an ISSUE with anyone having gaps in a series.

I have an issue with the idea that someone could start a series and then potentially leave it unfinished, yes. As a reader, if someone's gonna take more than one book to tell a story, I expect that eventually we'll get an ending. Once that expectation is removed, so is my incentive to even start a series.

Even though you're a voracious reader yourself, you seem not to care at all about the reader's side of things. You love to tell me how authors don't "owe" their readers anything, but forget that without readers, authors cannot have a writing career. We're not just Martin's audience, we're his shareholders. We've spent coin on his product, and we liked what we got for our money, at first. We, readers, are the ones who put Martin where he is. He often acts like he understands that, but then he tells us all to "git awf mah lawn" when we start asking when we can expect to resume enjoying his series.

You have a choice -- wait for the books if Martin manages them, or stop reading the series. That's it.

And many have chosen the latter course. Worse, this could hurt the entire idea of serialized fantasy. I've mentioned that there are already readers who won't even buy a series that isn't complete. Can you imagine the impact this will have should this become the dominant idea? It will, essentially, kill fantasy.

Black Company is a multi-part series -- the full saga of the Black Company with a long, continuous war. The first trilogy isn't really a trilogy. It's just the first set of battles, equivalent to ending at A Clash of Kings. It ends some storylines, but not the set of wars with sorcerers that the Black Company juggles. And reality is that Cook has taken sixteen years and counting to write one book. Which is fine with me, but you are only interested in insisting authors are alike when it serves your purposes to say Martin did you wrong. Not when it shows authors sometimes take a long time to do books.

I recently read The Black Company series. And honestly, I kinda felt like it ran out of steam and should be shorter than it is. Again, I was surprised to hear that more books were allegedly coming. I feel like the story I started reading reached a satisfying conclusion a while back and doesn't need to keep going. This isn't at all like waiting more than half a decade to find out if Arya is permanently blind, if John Snow is really dead, if Dany will ever actually cross the sea, etc.

You don't care about the Black Company saga and finding out what happens, even though Cook has an outline. So we're all not supposed to be upset at Cook.

Wow, way to boil that down. I can't speak for the masses, I can only speak for myself. I didn't read The Black Company in full until recently (though I did read a good portion of the first book several years ago). I feel like the plot we were initially introduced to, and the characters we were initially introduced to, have been fully explored and we don't need follow-ups. The new characters interested me a good deal less, and overall I feel like it's one of those series that could go on and on and never truly end. There's always going to be new recruits to carry the story on, new threats to face, etc. By the time I was finished Dreams of Steel I began to realize that the series was now substantially different than the one I began reading. It only got more different.

The experience reading ASOIAF could not be more different. As much as people like to joke about Martin killing all the characters, a majority of the POV characters we spent time with, got to know and love, etc., are still there, stuck in the middle of their personal journeys, and none of them have reached a conclusion, or even a good place to leave them. Unlike The Black Company, this series doesn't feel like it could keep going with new characters. The characters are the focus, and we're sitting around waiting to find out what happens to them.

See? I do acknowledge authors are different!

But you do care about Martin's Song and are obsessed that he had a general outline.

You latch on to a couple of things I say as part of a series of remarks and obsess about it. I said one thing about Martin having an outline vs. King shooting from the hip, and suddenly I'm "obsessed" with the fact that Martin had an outline. Martin himself blamed having to re-write his outline as part of the issue getting Dance finished. All I was saying was that he's already done that, so unless he's run into yet more problems with the narrative, it doesn't explain the lag.

So we're all supposed to be upset at Martin because you are upset.

Never said anything of the kind. I'm not even that upset. Like I said, just disappointed. But you're behaving as though not only should no one be upset, that we don't even have a right to be disappointed, and that Martin's lag time is completely normal, and it's weird that "only Martin" gets attacked this way.

You weren't that upset before, so you didn't think that those who were upset about Dragons were being fair. But now you're upset too because Martin didn't do things the way you think he should do them on Winter, even though you don't know what is actually going on. So we're supposed to go along with being upset now too.

Should I open my mouth a bit wider? Does it help when you pour in those words? I never said anything like what you just accused me of. If you're not upset, fine. I don't care. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, including people who you disagree with. You've spent this entire thread telling me that people who feel like I do are weird for focusing on just one author and demanding he do what we want when we want it. All I want is to be able to read serialized fiction without having to wait years upon years to find out what's going on with these characters. They're all in limbo right now; a holding pattern, and their pattern is degrading because I often find I don't remember what happened in the last volume because it's been years since I read it. You keep telling me it's unreasonable of me to expect a series to eventually get all its volumes out in a time frame that allows us to pick up where we left off without having to get a refresher course on what's already happened every five to seven years. I suggest that comparatively few authors make it so I need to do this, and suddenly I'm "expecting all authors to be the same". I ask only that I be able to finish what I start. Apparently this makes me unreasonable, frothing at the mouth, harassing the poor man.

Doesn't work like that. What you want is irrelevant to what is. What you care about does not then make it reasonable for other people. Just because you have a new set of demands does not mean that Martin can or should conform to them.

What I'm gleaning from your viewpoint is that I should basically just never read serialized fiction, because if an author decides to just cut his story off, never finish it, or take so long working on it that it's like he's decided not to finish, I should just be expected to live with that or not read. I said earlier that with this sort of attitude, fantasy would die. This is because fantasy, unlike most genres, lends itself so well to serialization that stand-alones have issues connecting with audiences. One volume is usually not enough to really let us absorb this reality that is different from our own. The stand-alones that work best are generally stories set in a realistic world with just a touch of the magical. Even UF or HF or anything non-sec-world, if it focuses on the mythical, magical elements, it's better to show us this world through multiple volumes so that we can get used to how things work here. Kill that aspect of fantasy, and you pretty much kill fantasy as we know and love it. It will exist only in comics and video games.

If some fans have different expectations about what they want, that's their problem. Fantasy was not a niche market ever. It's always been one of the most popular forms of fiction. The fantasy category book market -- which is not fantasy fiction in toto but a form of bookselling -- was indeed launched in the 1960's by publishers making up the science fiction category book market -- both of which were mainly in North America. It was mainly a housekeeping reorganization in bookselling -- fantasy books had been sold under/as SF often, but there was really no need to keep doing that, so they simply stopped, but the imprints remained SFF imprints, which sometimes also did horror. Fantasy fans were numerous and had plenty of fantasy fiction to read for decades. Fantasy readers in the 1970's had tons to read in fantasy and fantasy horror and even fantasy romance, in both short and long form, followed by even more with the tie-in books. Thousands and thousands of mass market paperbacks in fantasy and science fiction were put out, sold mainly to the wholesale market with not that much author promotion directly, and often sold a lot more than most of the titles being put out today. The idea that fantasy fiction was a desert until The Sword of Shannara was published is a myth that does not match the facts. Nobody waited around patiently for series to finish because that's all they had. That's silly.

I've noticed you failed to address my main point, which was that even at that time I don't see the kind of gigantic gaps in releases you're insisting were commonplace. In fact, other than The Black Company, you've not mentioned any series that have done this to readers, and even there I have already talked about the differences. I and others didn't realize the series wasn't concluded, so the idea that there are more volumes allegedly coming out seems more like overkill.

Again, you are stating here with this argument that authors aren't different and Martin's output must be measured by other authors' output. But again, other authors' output has nothing to do with Martin's work on Song.

You act like I'm suggesting there can be no variation between authors and how they work. I'm just saying that even with all the variation, Martin still stands out. And to deny he stands out is "not dealing with reality". Martin's lengthy lag times have made the news. The evening news has made stories out of how long Martin is taking to release his volumes. Name another author in this genre that's happened to. Now, I know what you're going to say; "It's because GOT has become a cultural phenomenon. If that weren't the case, they wouldn't care." Except that the first story I saw about this was from 2011, just after the release of Dance. GOT was only one recently-aired season old at the time and while it was a hit, it was still viewed by the media as "that new HBO fantasy show", and not as the cultural phenomenon it is today.

And when we have talked about authors with long delays, (even though this again has nothing to do with Martin, but does provide the evidence you keep asking for,) you've tried to brush them off. If X author can do this, why can't Martin has nothing to do with actual fiction writing.

You have yet to present me with another author who's truly left his readers hanging like this. Again, Cook decided he wanted to write more in a series most readers felt already was sufficiently concluded. King is more comparable, but his books kept coming and he included easter eggs to the series people wanted more of...and he only one time made us wait longer than five years. I asked you to point me to another author whose gaps kept getting longer and longer, another author who spent literally decades delivering a relatively short series. So far you haven't done that. I'm not holding them to different standards; the situations are entirely different.

You can totally quote his research. With the understanding that some of it is wrong or incomplete and that a lot of the rest of it does not back up what you're saying about Martin. Which is why I referenced the post Wert did in this thread which you have ignored. And if it's a minor disagreement, why have we kept having this long conversation?

Because you won't let me have my opinion. You want me to admit I'm wrong to feel how I do about this.

First off, you have no right to any information about his physical or emotional health. It's none of your business.

Never said it was. I said I wondered about it, but I never demanded Martin tell us diddly. I also suggested that when he was directly asked about his health, he gave no indication of any sort of health problem, and while that doesn't mean there isn't one, it's mere speculation that he might be suffering depression or any other emotional issues. I chose not to waste time worrying about any mental or emotional health issues he may or may not have.

You don't own the man and he doesn't work for you.

I don't own him, but who's he writing for if not readers?

(And same with Scott Lynch -- that he was forced in part by harassment to talk about his depression was a bad thing.) Second, you seriously do not understand how bad it got with people harassing Martin. His making a statement about personal issues, whatever that statement might be, would be used as another excuse to attack him. This is what we are talking about as unprecedented. This is again a minority slice of so-called fans, but Martin has to deal with levels of harassment that are usually only reserved for trying to drive women off-line. Again, this is part of the unreasonable Internet culture where demands that authors never faced before are claimed to be justified. They are not. Which is why an exasperated F you to people insulting and attacking him over his own health and weight (and on this particular point Jordan's death seems to be a factor in those attacks,) is not at all surprising.

You mentioned threats. What kind of threats? "I'll never buy another book you write" or "I'm going to kill Paris if I don't have the book in my hands in one month"? Did he receive thousands or millions of said threats or just a handful from obviously unhinged people? You're right, I don't know how bad it got and I'm not sure you do either, unless he told you personally. Now, I'm not excusing anyone here. I'm only talking about how I personally have come to feel, and even I don't feel like you've characterized me.

The unspoken understanding is a piece of crap.

Again, so I should never read serialized fiction, is what you're saying. Because authors don't owe us an ending and with that attitude, increasingly authors will decide they don't have to give us one. Sorry, but as a reader, I don't feel it's wrong to ask that a series that's obviously working toward a conclusion eventually reach that conclusion. Sure, some series are different. The volumes more self-contained and designed to be read in whatever order you want. Others have only small threads of continuity, and are designed to keep going. They're not building to anything, it's just a case of "here's a time in the life of this character or setting". ASOIAF obviously is building to a conclusion. We want to read it. I don't see why that makes us unreasonable.

It's just another justification for shouting at an author.

Which I reiterate I've never done.

Some readers don't care. And so they make unreasonable demands not based on facts. And again, that some readers have this attitude is not Martin's problem.

Some writers talk about the series they're planning on but haven't started yet. It creates interest, but it's hardly the same as leaving readers hanging. Some people might be disappointed that they never got to read Robert Jordan's Infinity of Heaven story but they don't feel left twisting in the wind by it.

Compare Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass, which excited me the moment I heard about it. A steampunk series from an author I love? Where can I buy it? I'll reserve my copy now, please. Then the wait began, but here's the thing; I hadn't already started reading it. I was excited to get started, but it wasn't ready yet, and I had other stuff to read while waiting. I didn't feel like I'd been fed a morsel then left to starve. I felt like a great meal was on its way, but hadn't gotten here yet.

Not to mention the general public was not told about this great new upcoming series that will be released next year only to wait until 1996. We didn't know about it until it was announced, and that was not in 1991.

Again, most of horror is fantasy fiction, so horror fans are also fantasy readers usually, unless they have very narrow tastes.

Most horror readers I talk to, online and in real life, read horror, thriller, action, spy, mystery, realistic fiction, maybe light SFF at best. but they don't read much fantasy and the more "fantastical" it is, the less they're interested.

Horror is a frequent element in fantasy fiction. But I still don't get where you are going with this. King writes horror, science fiction and fantasy. Martin writes science fiction, horror and fantasy. Are you trying to say that because King became a phenom with fantasy horror, the fantasy fans who wanted one of his biggest works, Dark Tower, should totally have been okay with delays or something? Because they were not, as mentioned above.

I'm saying that King's readers and Martin's readers tend to be different groups of people. Of course there's overlap, and I haven't really researched how two such circles would intersect on a Venn diagram, but I have had long drawn-out talks with a lot of King readers, and not one of them was a fantasy reader. TDT was an exception for them.

Yes there are. Epic fantasy series usually run around the 500-600 page mark.

That's the average. Which means there are a lot that run much shorter (300-400 pages) and lots that run much longer (700+). But I try to go by word count, not page count. Page count can be misleading. I compared word counts of Martin to a huge list of others that write in the same or similar sub-genres (sec-world, pre-industrial, epic, etc.) and Martin is about average. His books are long, but his word count is the same or lower than his peers. And I only bring it up to counter Wert's assertion that Martin's books are so uncommonly huge that no one could write them in less than five or six years.

Martin writes books that are a thousand pages long for Song. So that's two average epic fantasy books per book -- ten books from five.

Yes, but he's only produced five of them.

WOT books weren't all of them as long, but many were, and there were more books in total.

MBOTF's main sequence was ten books long, and only three of them were below 350,000 words.

I could go on, but you've made it clear that you don't care about what other authors can do, even while suggesting there's nothing odd or unusual about Martin's lags.

Yes, you have been. You just did it above, when you said he should report to fans about his mental health.

Again, open my mouth and insert some words. You brought up the idea that Martin could very well be struggling with mental/emotional health issues, too. I merely said that while he might be, we don't know that, and Martin isn't talking about it, so unless we hear it from him it's mere speculation. I also suggested that Martin hasn't become reclusive or withdrawn which suggests to me that he likely isn't dealing with mental/emotional struggles. But I could be wrong. I don't know, and it doesn't matter.

Even though he was threatened with near violence. Even though anything he says provokes online harassment or is regarded as an ironclad promise that then he's clearly broken and so is a horrible person worthy of harassment and insults.

I have not insulted Martin. I have not harassed him. I have not threatened him. I will never do those things. And no, I don't consider it an insult to speculate that he might simply be tired of writing this series and no longer all that inspired to do so. Again, you seem to think that no fan should ever expect that a series he likes will eventually have all the volumes released. You act as if that's unreasonable in itself. The threats and harassment are unreasonable, but not merely suggesting that Martin is taking longer to release the volumes than we should be asked to wait.

He's dealing with that situation and you're ignoring it and keep asking, why won't he talk to fans about his writing on the Internet?

I'm not asking that. Saying "I wonder what's the hold up" isn't saying "Martin needs to tell us everything that's going on in his life right now." I have said, and will say again, that Martin told us exactly what sort of issues he was running into with Dance, but has more or less suggested that he doesn't have those issues anymore, so the situation now is not the same as then. This isn't a demand. It's just me weighing the evidence I have. This time, unlike between Feast and Dance, Martin has not had to throw out his outline and start over, he hasn't had to chuck a year's worth of work, and hasn't talked about hitting any walls similar to the Meereenese knot. Do I demand he give us answers? No, I don't demand anything. But that doesn't mean I can't wonder. You've been equating my idle wondering with a frothing demand for Martin to hold a press conference and unload about his life, or something. I've already said I preferred when he just kept quiet and didn't give anyone false hopes.

That Martin hoped that Winter would go faster -- and still may since it's not been as long as Dragons -- does not mean that it would necessarily go faster.

It hasn't been as long yet, but I fully expect it to be longer. In less than a year, it will be as long. I don't think we can expect it this year.

The most hopeful scenario I have is that it gets released in 2018.

Yeah, you have. That he has an outline so it should go faster (you know how he should write,) that he should produce pages in X number of years (you know how he should write,) etc. Instead of trying to micro-manage Martin, you're going to have to wait till he works it out himself.

Again, you've mischaracterized my statements and removed context.

Anyway, I'm getting too tired of this argument to respond to the rest. I end this discussion the same way I began it; a fan who is disappointed but ready to move on. In fact, have already. I still do think that as of the latter half of the 20th century and the 21st century, Martin's increasing lag times stand out and are not normal or something we should expect, and I do think that while writers have no legal obligation to finish anything they start, the attitude that no one should expect it or that they're unreasonable and demanding if they do is very unhealthy.

And that's all.

 

[Takoren]

There is an interesting philosophical question here about what professionals "owe" the people who pay their salaries.

Indeed. And one must ask why the situations are different.

Does a professional baseball player "owe" his fans his best effort every night?

Maybe he doesn't, but he's certainly expected to and not just by fans. Eventually, enough nights of his not giving his best will lead to his being cut.

Does a doctor "owe" her patient perfect diagnoses and treatment every office visit?

Why, yes, she does. In this case, money is going directly into her pocket from the patient's and the patient has every right to expect their money's worth.

Does a janitor "owe" the building superintendents a spotless floor every shift?

Absolutely. It's his job! It's in his job description! It's why he's paid!

Are there moral obligations in addition to any legal ones? Where do we draw the line between perfection and simply doing "good enough?" After considering all of that, why is an author different than a baseball player whose fans will boo if he doesn't hustle?

And this is the rub of what I've been arguing. Sure, Martin's under no legal obligation to write one more word. But we're his customers. A business that keeps its customers waiting goes out of business. A player that keeps disappointing his fans gets benched.

I want to ask, if I'm being unreasonable now, at what point can I become reasonable? After another year? After another five years? If Martin really does die before finishing, am I still unreasonable? Just how long should I, a reader, be asked to wait before I say "that's just too long"? At what point will Martin's lags actually become unusually long if they're not already?

Regardless, and I've said this before, but if we (i.e. the entertainment consuming public) keep paying for unfinished stories, then we'll keep getting unfinished stories. I don't think it does much good to blame Martin or Jordan or Cook or Rothfuss for taking forever to finish a series when we're the ones supporting the practice.

As I argued above, this attitude is growing, thanks mostly to Martin, with Rothfuss on the side. Kat says we should just accept it. You're saying "no thanks" and in response, not buying. And without serialized fantasy, the genre will stagnate.

 

[DJ94122]

I want to ask, if I'm being unreasonable now, at what point can I become reasonable?

I don't think it's a question with a binary answer. KatG can claim you are being unreasonable, but she's just offering you her opinion. I asked some of those questions above because while we expect that the athlete, doctor, and janitor will do their jobs to the best of their ability, they don't always manage it. How do we decide what a "reasonable" outcome is for an athlete, doctor, janitor, or author? The mechanisms for answering that question, as you note, are different in each case, but there's no reason to think that an author is immune from people opining about his effort. I think it's completely reasonable to have issues with Martin not finishing a series he told us he intended to finish. Or not finishing in a timely manner. You and KatG have both provided excellent reasons to support your views. To me, that satisfies the definition of "reasonable." A full twelve-member jury of your peers, however, could always disagree.

As I argued above, this attitude is growing, thanks mostly to Martin, with Rothfuss on the side. Kat says we should just accept it. You're saying "no thanks" and in response, not buying. And without serialized fantasy, the genre will stagnate.

As David noted above, some authors have seen recent success publishing an entire series concurrently (or nearly concurrently). Michael Sullivan's Riyria Revelations is one. Brent Week's Night Angel Trilogy is another. Both series were excellent. It can be done!

 

[Takoren]

I don't think it's a question with a binary answer. KatG can claim you are being unreasonable, but she's just offering you her opinion.

I purposefully phrased a few things as though Kat is the arbiter of opinion, when such a position cannot exist, because it seems like there's a contingent (Kat and Wert are on it) that says no matter how long the wait is, you aren't allowed to complain or take issue. Either stop reading or wait patiently, even if it's another decade.

I asked some of those questions above because while we expect that the athlete, doctor, and janitor will do their jobs to the best of their ability, they don't always manage it. How do we decide what a "reasonable" outcome is for an athlete, doctor, janitor, or author? The mechanisms for answering that question, as you note, are different in each case, but there's no reason to think that an author is immune from people opining about his effort. I think it's completely reasonable to have issues with Martin not finishing a series he told us he intended to finish. Or not finishing in a timely manner. You and KatG have both provided excellent reasons to support your views. To me, that satisfies the definition of "reasonable." A full twelve-member jury of your peers, however, could always disagree.

Welp, there we are. And for the record, contrary to what Kat was saying about me, I don't care if others are content to wait as long as it takes. Nowhere in this thread did I tell Kat, Wert or whomever that they were wrong for not being upset, but I was told that I was wrong for my disappointment.

As David noted above, some authors have seen recent success publishing an entire series concurrently (or nearly concurrently). Michael Sullivan's Riyria Revelations is one. Brent Week's Night Angel Trilogy is another. Both series were excellent. It can be done!

I have often wondered why Martin didn't do a version of this. After all, the reason we have five books in an unfinished series of seven rather than the trilogy he planned was because the first volume was so long he cut it off and released what he had, then did the same thing when the second volume started getting too long as well. Why did he release what he had immediately? Why not sit on it, then release a book a year? Was he under contract to deliver?

 

[KatG]

After considering all of that, why is an author different than a baseball player whose fans will boo if he doesn't hustle?

Because they are doing completely different things that work completely different ways.

I said I wasn't going to parse further long posts and I'm not. Takoren isn't Fung Koo and I will wear him out. So straight statement: I don't have a problem with folks being disappointed that Winds is taking longer -- or Dragons either. I'm disappointed. It's the ranting, which has less to do with anger for the folks here, (although there have been anger and threats directly at Martin from other fans, so yes Martin may be occasionally surly in those directions,) than it does with an inexplicable despair that is akin to the SF is dying for eighty years pathos, but which also comes with a bunch of demands that simply can never be fulfilled even if Martin finishes the series. Authors can't fulfill the demands that some fans have made of Martin. Complaints about Martin are contradictory and want to have it both ways -- both when Dragons was being written and now. On the one hand, he's being declared a special snowflake -- no other author has ever been as slow, had this much trouble, clearly must be failing. This entire thread is about that.

At the same time, the declaration is that Martin isn't a special snowflake. That he's just another author and should just get on with it and not have problems and delays or clearly he's loafing. He's both an artiste who absolutely must finish his masterwork, we must have his words, and also the same as a plumber (or a baseball player,) and writing large complicated fictional stories is no big whoop. He must produce the works as quickly as possible, just get it done and nothing else, and at the same time, he better not phone it in and must tinker with it to get it right. Martin must absolutely talk to fans about what is going on and endure any questioning some of the millions of fans want to bother him with monitoring him, or clearly all is ruined. At the same time, when he does talk to the fans, his estimates and hopes about the situation are clearly promises which he has deliberately or incompetently not met and so he has abandoned all and all is ruined.

When it's pointed out that there have been other series by authors where there have been long delays, including multi-part sagas, it's brushed off because it doesn't fit the narrative as Martin being the egregiously slow author. When it's pointed out that Martin actually spent several years before Games was published working on the first three books, and so the larger gaps for the last books are actually not that big a slow down from before for him, it's brushed off as inconviently fitting the narrative that Martin is failing, etc. When it's pointed out that Martin has written essentially ten average sized epic fantasy novels in five books, it's brushed off. People acknowledge that no author can guarantee a series unless they write the whole thing before they publish and either self-publish it or get a publisher to buy the whole thing and consider it ready to go -- an exceedingly rare occurrence. At the same time, they feel Martin only absolutely should guarantee it because they bought or read the books.

This was a constant refrain right up until Dragons came out. And then it started up again -- as soon as Dragons came out. The only real variation you've given it, T., is that you accepted that there were delays in writing Dragons, but don't accept that there should be delays in writing Winter.

Here's what we know (and you can use some of this in calculations of finishing as you like):

1) Martin does not write chronologically much of the time. Instead, he may be writing a whole character storyline which may be more than in one book. That was how he was able to split Crows and Dragons laterally.

2) Martin has significantly deviated from his original outlines in writing the series, not counting the end point, making up characters, events, developments and symbols, etc. as he writes, that then have to be adjusted in other character storylines and as part of the whole.

3) Because of all this, Martin tends to write longer than originally planned, creating more books in this series. It became a bigger series with a wider scope, though everything ties together. He is trying to make the last two books large to finish, but not so large that it turns into more than two books.

4) Martin writes parts of the next book while he's writing the current book, and which parts go where are often decided later in the process. That makes tracking how long it actually took him to write any of the books a bit more tricky than simple pub dates.

5) Martin has had contractual promotional obligations with publishers and HBO that make it difficult to write and coordinate on the series when he's doing them, like most authors. This caused some delay in 2011 and occasionally after. Martin has negotiated to get out of as many of those obligations as possible, especially recently, so that he can work on the book.

6) Martin works with his editors while he's writing the book, so that the editing process can be done and production can be fastlined.

7) At the beginning of 2012, Martin had at least 200 pages finalized for Winter, which had also been seen by his publisher.

8) Martin has been working on the book and having parts run past his editors, and has periodically over the last several years read and released finalized chapters from the book.

9) Martin has run into problems writing the book, and was not able to keep up with the television show schedule thereby.

And that's really it. All the other suppositions are fantasy.

If Martin wanted to stop writing the series, he could just stop. No one could stop him and the t.v. show doesn't care at this point. If Martin was tired of writing the series and just wanted to phone it in and get it over with, he could just do that. He could crib from the t.v. scripts based on his updated outline and notes, adjust details to better match what was in the books, and there you go. He could hire a ghost writer and you'd never know. He could have Abraham do it and Abraham would never tell.

But instead, it's going to be -- unexpectedly -- the work he's best know for. It's his baby. He wants to try to finish it. He's working on it. That was the same situation as with Dragons. Which he did produce. I don't know when or if he'll finish the series. You never do know (buses, etc.) And I, along with most, would certainly like to have his words over others. Otherwise, the t.v. show might be preferred by some, which is fine.

But the despair over Martin -- that he's given up, that he's hopelessly stuck, that he's toying with fans, that fans should be able to demand authors turn over fiction to them at regular intervals, that authors running into problems doing stories is strange and unacceptable -- at least if it's Martin -- all those lines that went on with first Crows, then Dragons and then just repeated with Winter -- it doesn't match facts and it doesn't work with how authors actually pull stories and finalize them out of their brains. It's just fatalism.

And again, I wouldn't necessarily mind others having fatalism on top of their disappointment. But the constant insistence that fatalism is somehow fact and that if I don't agree I'm taking a "controversial position," and the insistence of all these supposed mental states of Martin's, it gets a bit surreal. I really didn't want to rehash it again, but Takoren wouldn't let it go. I'm supposed to agree that the series is a mess and that this has never happened before and why don't I see that this series will never be finished and that Martin has somehow done this to me horribly. And I don't, because all that has nothing to do with the actual facts on the ground.

So if your calculation for finish is that there never will be a finish to the series, fine, that's your calculation. But false claims about Martin's publishing history, bugging me about why don't I feel Martin is unreasonably slow and has failed, etc., you ask me that stuff, then you're going to get the stuff above where we go over again about actual facts and how fiction authors actually write and why what other authors do in output is irrelevant to what's happened with Song.

So we did that. Again. For the umpteenth time. I didn't ask to do it. I tried to avoid it, but had Takoren going "but don't you agree," "don't you think that," etc. Don't try to pin this on me. You didn't have to read my posts either. And I am perfectly happy to never have the conversation again. I probably shouldn't have done it this time. (Wert very smartly dropped a timeline and walked off.) Especially since if he gets Winter out, we'll just have the same moaning over Spring.

but I was told that I was wrong for my disappointment.

No, you damn well were not told that. I said I understood that you were disappointed, and that I was also disappointed. Everybody is disappointed. George is disappointed. Our discussion had nothing to do with your disappointment but with the claims you were making about Martin and fiction writing and your arguing that I find those claims reasonable and some of them factual, which they weren't. I'm glad you were just having a conversation. But don't claim I went after you when you bugged me to have the conversation. (Not that I didn't enjoy parts of it and the movie stuff.)

 

[courtney]

wow....



I just fell down the same rabbit hole I fell down years ago....

just without the scat fetish images thank god....
So yeah, loving the books, love the TV series, Love Martin, and love Kat.
Look forward to the next book, and hope it hits sooner rather than later.

 

[KatG]

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where -' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
'- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.”

 

[Werthead]

Ok, so now I expect a late 2017/2018 release for The Winds of winter as the last "real" novel of the series followed by a novelization of the TV show and/or a compendium detailing the fates of the characters in the book series (especially when such were different from the show or for characters not included) in 2020 or so when it is clear no more novels are coming out - this may change if rumors that HBO want to do an "adventures of Jon Snow/Stark/Targaryen" after the end of the current storyline series are true, but the Winds of Winter will be the last novel in the series (written by GRRM as despite protestations to the contrary I can easily see him hiring a younger author from his Wild Cards stable of authors to write the final novel/s in 2020 or so) with 95%+ probability imho

This will not happen. Ever. The books are finished by George or they are not finished at all, period.

The only contingency I have ever heard Martin consider (when pressed at it at a convention) was that if he was in an RJ situation, he might write a detailed plot summary for later release. But he really hates it when another author takes a series over. In his experience of things that happened to friends of his like Roger Zelazny, it ends badly (although he has also acknowledged that he'd heard good things about Sanderson, but hasn't read WoT so can't speak to how well that turned out).

This is why I don't accept "it's because the books are huge!" as an answer. Yes, authors write at different paces, but there are not many authors who do this kind of thing, which is why he stands out. No one's yelling "Dammit, when's Erikson gonna get off his ass and finish the Kharkanas trilogy?" because we know he will. The second book just came out.

And we know that George will do everything in his power to finish ASoIaF, even if we do have to accept that it will be done at a rate no-one (least of all George) is happy with.

Their plan feels a bit weird. Why two truncated seasons instead of one longer one? Thirteen episodes isn't an unthinkably long season. Is there some reason the remainder of the story needs two years, but less hours, to tell? (BTW, I'm just thinking out loud, not actually asking.)

It actually takes between 13 and 14 months to write, film and edit a season of GoT with just 10 episodes, because of the amount of filming on location they do. You may notice that there is less than 14 months in a year, so they have to simultaneously shoot multiple episodes at once, cut multiple episodes at once and cram the writing into shorter and shorter periods of time each season. That almost broke them this season when they went way over time and budget for episode 609. So they went to HBO and told them they only had 13 episodes or so left after this season, but there was no way they could film 13 episodes in one season (unless they drop back the final season until September or something). By breaking it into 7 and then 6 episodes, that gives them more money per-episode but more importantly more time per-episode.

Erikson's main MBOTF sequence contained ten novels, all of equal or surpassing length to the ASOIAF books

He got close once (with Toll the Hounds at about 390,000 words) but the rest are significantly shorter than ASoS and ADWD. Bantam formatted the books really bizarrely to get the page counts really high. I still don't know why, as it cost them more money to do so.

But I've turned from apologist to angry fan, and not just due to how long he's taking but also his lack of respect for fans. Does he "owe" us anything? No. But we don't owe him anything, either. We paid our money and made it possible for him to make writing his day job. And in return he acts like we don't matter.

George has been a full-time writer since the late 1970s, when he got the advance for his first novel. He was a full-time writer a decade and a half before he started writing ASoIaF, and twenty years before it was published. He'd bought both his houses and his car long before AGoT was published, and the money he'd made in Hollywood would have likely set him up for life. It's completely untrue to say that ASoIaF was what made GRRM a success and before that he'd been a nobody.

What does irk is when people say that George doesn't respect his fans or acts like they don't matter. He owes everything to his fans. He makes himself available to talk to fans in a way no author at his level of fame has ever really done before. That's not disrespect, that's the very opposite of it.

when we have Goodkinds, Jordans, Eriksons, Sandersons, et al, who can deliver books of equal length in much shorter time, I maintain that Martin's gaps stand out like a sore thumb.

Equal lenth (almost), but not in equal quality. Seriously, Goodkind? Jordan and Sanderson have never been as good as Martin: very readable with lots of good ideas, but they're not batting on the same literary level at all. Erikson could have done (DHG and MoI come very close to ASoS levels of quality), but mid-series he got bitten by the urge to become a literary author and he hasn't quite got the chops for it, leaving his series suffering from massive cod-philosophical asides that drained plot and story momentum from each novel and reduced his characters to near-identical ciphers. They're actually still pretty good despite that, but despite the ardent fervour of its small hardcore fanbase, they're not on the level of ASoIaF either (although, unlike the others, I think Erikson has a comparable work in him if he dials back the philosophising and engaged his passion a bit more).

I'm far from excited about the bastardized version of DT we're apparently getting

It's interesting. Apparently the film series of DT will be both an adaptation of the books and a sequel to them (thanks to DT's crazy structure, that's perfectly possible).

I know, but you were comparing The Dark Tower, which King openly said he wasn't sure where he was going with it, to ASOIAF, which Martin mapped out, then revised and mapped out again.

Huh? No. Martin produced a rough outline for a trilogy when he was trying to sell the books, but said in the outline that it was very, very rough and wouldn't not long survive contact with his word processor. He did the same thing with the outline he produced when the series went to six books. And as far as we know that was the last outline he wrote, in 1998, before the gap was introduced and abolished and before everything else happened. Martin has certain plot beats and an ending in mind, but he doesn't have everything mapped out to the last detail.

Gaiman doesn't really do series much

He did write a 2,000-page fantasy saga that is one of the most seminal works of the imagination ever written and published. And it took eight years and the experience of doing it I think convinced him never to even think about anything on that scale again. When he wrote American Gods, which was supposed to kick off a longer series, he almost immediately retreated from it and has shied away from writing the sequel, even though the TV series is supposed to be based on it as well as the original (and elements from Anansi Boys).

I didn't ignore them, but he included all the time Martin spent prepping to write this series. To be blunt, readers don't care. Most of us hadn't read Martin at all prior and many of us didn't even read the first volume of the series for a few years after it was released. As I mentioned previously, I started reading in 2003. Martin prepping to write a series no one had read yet or even heard was being planned is only important if you're writing a history on Martin's career. It isn't as if we were waiting with baited breath the minute we heard he was writing a fantasy series.

When news leaked that Martin was writing an epic fantasy series, some people did get excited. Wild Cards was a big deal at the time, Martin's TV work had been well-received and his SFF short story collections were exceptionally well-regarded. When he put ASoIaF out to sell, the reactions were immense and publishers got into bidding wars over it (Gollancz and HarperCollins fought over it tooth-and-nail and eventually HarperCollins had to pay out well over £600,000 for the rights...which in 1995 money was completely insane).

Also, if you're analysing how long it takes Martin to write each book in the series, you do need to acknowledge the fact that Book 1 also took five years to write, because it is significant.

As is a significant chunk of epic fantasy.

Actually, no. The overwhelming majority of modern epic fantasy is far, far simpler and more streamlined than that GRRM is doing and what authors like Jordan used to do: Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence use very small casts (or even single protagonists) rather than dozens of characters scattered across multiple continents. Bakker's story equal's GRRM's in scope and scale, but he lasers the story in on just three theatres and a handful of characters in each theatre to tell the story. Sanderson also has a big story which is reduced to just a couple of fronts and the characters there. Erikson's core MBF series was operating on Martin's level, or even beyond it in complexity, but he in his rush to write the series (he only ever wrote first drafts) he lost the thread of a lot of the stories and characters and the books are absolutely jammed full of plot holes. Many are ignorable, but there's a few howlers which are just wince-inducing. GRRM is very keen to avoid those of kind of problems and inconsistencies.

Looking at epic fantasy now I'm struck by how small most of them are. In many ways that's a great thing - Guy Gavriel Kay produces novels on a par with GRRM's in quality but always as single, stand-alone volumes - but it's also a shame that good multi-character, multi-location epics have almost vanished.