I was working for his publisher in 2016, and the whole company was geared towards a September release for the Winds of Winter - editing, marketing, physical printing, everything. It was not the first time, but they had extracted a cast-iron promise that the book would be finished, and tha's as good as it gets in publishing. September came, then left, then more months, then more... His editor chose to live in a cave in the mountains of Morocco.
Considering how popular the show was at its peak, the fact that there is still more content to come and how IPs are being rehashed all the time, it would a non zero chance that they redo the entire thing someday.
what's funny is that, from what i recall hearing, the creative forces behind the tv show essentially got bored with the show and crammed a ton of stuff into season 8 and kinda just phoned it in. iirc hbo was willing for one or two more seasons after 8
that's an insane amount of money if it's accurate. wonder why they couldn't just negotiate with hbo to let them free and have someone else do their part.
The franchise seems to be alive and well. My daughter really likes the prequel series. But season 8 definitely dulled the show's impact on popular culture. (Obligatory: Don't name your kids after a series' characters until it's done. So sorry to all the Danaerys's and Khaleesis out there...)
TBH, _if_ he finished it, he has a golden opportunity to capitalize on people's dissatisfaction and publish an ending to the series that people will like. Then they can reboot the whole TV series and he can buy a few islands...
I'm boycotting the prequel series on principle because I assume Benioff and Weiss will receive royalties and residuals from it. I don't watch it even when it's in-flight entertainment.
It's reminiscent of Fullmetal Alchemist. The first attempt went completely off the rails when the writers ran out of source material and it had a very unsatisfying ending. However, after the manga was fully out, they re-made it as "Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood" and it was 10x better because the story had a cohesive and satisfying conclusion.
I think he was close to a finished story that was basically what we saw in season 8 (we were told he shared an outline of the ending with D&D early on), but the reception for that story was so dire that he’s been sent back to the drawing board, putting him years behind.
I personally thought it would have been a pretty decent storyline if executed properly. Daenerys' father was the mad king after all, so it was rather fitting.
My wife and I were hardcore fans and we stopped after season 1 of House of Dragons (I stopped halfway but my wife watched the full season). I don’t know anyone in my circle of friends that watched season 2 vs everyone I know watched GOT. The difference in ratings is stark (pun intended). I don’t think it’s going to continue.
Reminds me of some underrated Peter Thiel advice: almost always an extra hour invested in a project you’re already deeply into will have greater returns than starting some totally tangential thing from scratch.
The tangential thing will always feel better because you make rapid progress at the start, but the real returns come from completion.
I think that GRRM could have delivered the same ending in a way that the fans would have loved. The failure really comes down to how quickly they rushed it, and didn't really give plausible explanations for the characters actions.
Honestly the books were hinting that Daenerys would end up the way she did in the show. The show just did it in a very hamfisted manner.
This is my take as well. It was the right ending -- the problem was the last season should have been 2 (maybe even 3) seasons. I think the decision to "wrap it up" with season 8 was the network's decision for budgetary reasons? Can't remember.
The story I heard at the time was that HBO really did want to extend it to more seasons (why wouldn't they?), but the two show runners wanted to be done. They had recently signed on to a Star Wars show I believe.
Every gymnast's routine ends with them on the floor. People didn't hate the ending, they hated the landing. A bad landing can trash a gymnast's score or a show's IMDb rating.
Edit: I'm amazed at Season 8's IMDb ratings. I thought the whole thing was a trash fire but the first 3 episodes - half the season - are still rated over 7.5.
> but the first 3 episodes - half the season - are still rated over 7.5
From what I remember the first three were competent and engaging enough in isolation but their plot beats locked in the inevitable car crash that only the book readers and super fans saw coming. Most of the ratings were probably soon after airing so the scores don't reflect the season as a whole.
The series of the universe the paper is set in is one he's been editing since before he wrote Game of Thrones so is this procrastination on GoT or the opposite and he's no longer procrastinating by writing the ASOIAF series?
This seems more like an epidemiology paper than a physics paper. They probably could have modeled it after the Zaire Ebola virus, with a mortality rate of 90 percent.
Since the article doesn't mention it: Ian Tregillis (the first author of the paper and staff scientist at Los Alamos) also moonlights as a sci-fi/fantasy author. Personally I found The Milkweed Triptych a more compelling read than A Song of Ice and Fire, and it also has the benefit of being finished! (Here's a one sentence hook: WWII, except with English wizards fighting Nazi X-Men.)
Well, then don't read it! While that's the most campy distillation of the premise, the writing is anything but. George R.R. Martin himself declared Tregillis "a major new talent".
Being a) self-employed and b) already wealthy (no deadlines) and c) doing something purely creative, i.e. non-technical ... that's the worst case scenario for motivation.
Yeah. And also fear of ideas not being good enough to match the (by now) likely overblown fan expectations. It's like Valve considering to make Half-life 3: anything less than a masterpiece would be a disappointment.
Also just being free of the expectations of others. No matter how it turns out I bet it'd be nice if he could wake up and know that it's been finished and that he doesn't have to worry about people asking about it anymore
I love that he actually posts % complete widgets at the top of his website showing how far along he is in the multiple books he authors at once. Closest thing to a Grafana dashboard for authors we’re going to get!
I don't blame them for writing themselves into corners, but lacking the courage to tell your readers that you've done so and there will be no resolution to the story you've been writing doesn't impress me. I don't think they owe people a resolution, but I do think they owe them a bit of honesty.
The thing that irks me the most is that Patrick Rothfuss used to brag about how he had already completed all three books of the trilogy, and just needed to do editing passes.
GRRM's issue is that he needs to figure out how to get all of the interesting characters in one place from across a huge world. He just needs to write some sort of teleportation into the story, that's how Jordan handled it in the WoT series.
So about the writing themselves into a corner part, it would be unconventional but what about releasing a second revision of an earlier book to make the whole coherent?
I don't think rothfuss has it in him anymore. I love the books, but I think they were a self projection where the author wrote himself into the story, and then changed as a person. Kvothe has the personality of a 2005 reddit neckbeard that I can only assume is a lot less attractive to the author now in his 50s.
I really don't understand why his editors don't just provide him a team, like a tv show writing room, and he can bounce ideas off them and have them mechanically churn out his ideas. He could knock it out in a few months and be a hero and put it all behind him cleanly then.
Honestly, at this point I'd just take a wiki page with a brain dump of any unrevealed lore along with his vague plans of how he was going to tie it all together and just let the community figure out the rest of the story, Elden Ring style.
I think what really made Rothfuss special was how he would slip into poetic prose without overtly signaling the reader, and that this would be hard to mimic.
Same with his parallel construction of lore using repetition of similar but distinct stories.
Simply saying "this is the truth" or "this is what happened" would not be the same, and I dont think many fanfic authors could pull it off convincingly.
This, a lot of people that don't read very deeply just assume there isn't much there and it's just a mary sue self insert story and don't really notice any of the other themes that are going on. There is a lot of good writing going on, but I suppose for the people that don't care anyway, a rough fan fiction would be good enough for them.
I suspect there are a number of very human reasons why an author wouldn't want to do that. I also suspect the output would be pretty different.
I find the idea kind of revolting, but I am also surprised that collaborative writing is so rare. I suppose it cuts to the question of what the point of writing the book is in the first place.
It is hard to think of a recent example aside from the expanse by "James S.A. Corey"
High quality artistic collaboration is hard and even harder in a capitalist model (this is coming from libertarian capitalist). Compelling art is definitionally outside the mainstream, as this is a pre-requisite for novel insight and creativity. This is why hundred million dollar movies and series can't simply hire good writers.
GRRM procrastinates writing A Game of Thrones books by making A Game of Thrones TV shows. Patrick Rothfuss procrastinates by doing cheesy charity work (whose positive impact is dwarfed by what he could do by donating the money from a third book) and playing D&D on youtube or some shit.
I will not read the last one even if he publishes it. I won't disparage the guy here, but I am no longer a fan, and I have zero faith he will ever finish the series. And if he does, he gets zero minutes of my time and zero units of my money.
The first two really were good though. If he finishes the third I'll happily re-read the first two and then give the third a chance. I'm not starting anything new he writes until I know it has an ending though. That's also my rule for any series on Netflix.
I actually prefer my fantasy series to be unfinished. For me, a solid majority of the enjoyment is figuring out events and more from clues and foreshadowing.
There are so many things that I picked up on the third read through that I simply would have been told in a later book if they were all available.
> Guess Brandon Sanderson will have to finish their series after they die.
People say this often, and I don't get it. Sanderson is a terrible writer and his works and themes are nothing like ASOIAF. His only merit he has is "finishes books quickly". He's not even a fan of the books, he says they're "too dark" for him. He's the worst possible choice!
But I don't want anyone to finish ASOIAF if George dies before it's over. It's his story and no one else can do it right. We did this already and everyone hated it!
While I'm glad Sanderson finished the series, I still felt there was a pretty strong change in the feeling of the story.
Until he took over, Rand was basically continuously loosing his sanity in the pursuit of power, which he needed to fight the dark one, which brought him closer to the madness, feeding the cycle.
It kept getting more urgent, things kept escalating. But Sandersons Rand never really lost control, imo. Rand's success felt preordained by his story telling, whereas previously the only thing we could expect was that Rand would go down fighting.
To be clear, I'm aware that Sanderson finished the story via Jordan's notes. But I strongly suspect he wouldn't have kept to them if he wrote it himself. I base that opinion on the fact that the series was supposed to be way shorter. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something like 6 books
Brandon Sanderson only wrote the last book though? (which he split in two because all the stuff Robert Jordan wanted to cram in would have been a ridiculous 2000+ page tome) so it was already going to be at least 11 books by Robert Jordan. FWIW the two Sanderson books are my favourite of the series (but they are also the ending so it's hard to say)
His work finishing WoT is better than a lot of his own work. I think he's publicly said he wouldn't finish ASOIAF though. I'm sure part of it is out of respect for the GRRM who is still alive, but also Sanderson isn't really capable of writing adult themes and situations due to his mormon background, so he literally wouldn't be able to adequately complete it.
>We did this already and everyone hated it!
Because they rushed it in a way that made no logical sense.
Yeah fun fact: the books were already well enough known by the time WarCraft 3 was released that the final mission was named "A Symphony of Frost and Flame".
I'm convinced he has draft versions of the complete story at this point and will keep revising it till he passes away whereupon it'll be published posthumously.
From what I've read about his process the initial drafts will vary massively from the finished product because he's very iterative and will go on long digressions either getting characters to a point or exploring where characters would go from where they are at that particular point.
That's what gives them such a rich feeling because he's working with characters and how they'd perhaps operate in the world but that makes it hard to wrangle them into particular positions if you're dedicated to the idea that they should proceed naturally from where they are to where they are next. It leads to a bit of a combinatorial explosion of needing to setup causes to push them into the next part of the story but you have to setup those causes first, which need their own antecedents, and on and on and on.
I'm not seeing a lot of entitlement or anger. GRRM is not obligated to finish the series--but, neither is he free from people giving him shit for not finishing the series. If you start a book series, foster a fandom, sell the rights to it for a TV franchise, and then fail to complete it... yeah, people are gonna give you shit when you not only don't finish it, but also move on to a totally unrelated activity!
But I think most of the commentary here is just in fun. I'm not angry at GRRM, but TBH if I knew him I don't think I'd be able to pass up "so, George... how's the book coming?" every time I saw him -- or "dude, you'll do _anything_ but work on the book, huh?"
(Also: I am a writer. I know all about procrastination... best way to focus on writing is to have something else I don't want to do.)
