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Possibility GRRM is finishing final 2 books at same time?


House Holter

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This is what I tell myself. I know it's probably a lie but I don't care... it's all I have.



By the time TWoW hits the market, fingers crossed for early next year, he's gonna have a portion of ADoS written. A large portion, like 40%. Okay, 20%. By then season 5 will be airing in which they will hack through AFfC and ADwD in their customary manner, and maybe some spoiler Bran stuff from TWoW that GRRM has made available to them. By the time they're writing season 6 the source material will have been released. That season will go out a year after TWoW was released, cover the material from that book, but will not dip into ADoS. By then GRRM, writing like a man possessed, driven towards the light at the end of the tunnel, etc., will have ADoS almost complete. The writers of the show will have a large portion of canon material avialable with which to write season 7. Production will commence and the following spring the book will be released a month before the show airs. Okay, I'll settle for a week before, or even a day. One 24 hour day. I'll settle for simultaneous release.



If anything other than the scenario outlined above transpires, then I will refuse to watch t.v., or go on the internet, or talk to friends, or family, until the books come out. And I can assure you, ser, that is not a lie.


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I've said this before but I feel it's worth saying again... just because GRRM told D&D his intended ending for the major characters and the major plot lines, doesn't necessarily mean they'll keep to them. In season 1 I'd have thought saying such a thing was ridiculous, but as the seasons wear on and it becomes less and less faithfully adapted, well... I believe they'll do what they feel is best for their show and the (majority) of their fans, whether or not that keeps in line with GRRM's vision will be incidental. :dunno:



As for the OP's question, I think it's more likely that there's a chance the final two may be closer together in release dates (hoping at least :D) but probably not the same exact time. Can't wait to find out though!


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Hey there am new here so be kind. I dont know if this has been discussed before in another thred apologies if it has.

I know it might sound ludicrous to some but I have found myself wondering recently if there is a possibility that GRRM is finishing both books at same time.

That's what he did with AFFC and ADWD. Adding finishing touch to the nearly ready second half took him mere six years.

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Realistically, he has ~21 months to finish TWOW before the show significantly encroaches on the books. We have almost the entirety of the material from AFFC and ADWD left to go. That will probably cover closer to 1 season than 2, but it should still give him until April of 2016 to get it done. Since TWOW is rumored to be the longest volume yet at ~1500 pages, it and whatever might be left from the previous 2 should get us through until April 2018 which would be the start of season 7 (currently planned last season). So if he has a good deal of material in addition to TWOW at release it might not be a complete pipe dream that he'd stay ahead of the show.

That being said, the current pace suggests that the final book wouldn't come until ~2020, and even that assumes about 4.5 years per remaining volume. I'd say the smart money is the show ends a couple of years before the books.

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I've said this before but I feel it's worth saying again... just because GRRM told D&D his intended ending for the major characters and the major plot lines, doesn't necessarily mean they'll keep to them. In season 1 I'd have thought saying such a thing was ridiculous, but as the seasons wear on and it becomes less and less faithfully adapted, well... I believe they'll do what they feel is best for their show and the (majority) of their fans, whether or not that keeps in line with GRRM's vision will be incidental. :dunno:
 
As for the OP's question, I think it's more likely that there's a chance the final two may be closer together in release dates (hoping at least :D) but probably not the same exact time. Can't wait to find out though!


You say it's less and less faithfully adapted, but it's easy to see what the show is doing in terms of taking shortcuts. Meaning that they aren't changing things for the endgame to be different, they are changing things so that the endgame is the same. Take Tormund...he's now a prisoner of the NW. Why? Because that way they can cut Val and just have Tormund as Jon's middleman. Saves time and money, yet the endgame is the same.
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I'd be inclined to think that although the two books are not being written in parallel, I would expect the Dream of Spring to be complete comparatively soon after Winds of Winter. First at this stage in the game we should be starting to move towards a resolution with diverging threads coming together. Secondly I understand that GRRM concentrates on single POVs and will write, say, several Tyrion chapters one after the other and then weave them into the other POVs later rather than writing the book in the order in which we read it. It follows therefore that when the guillotine comes down to "finish" Winds of Winter he will have several chapters in hand left for Dream, just as the battles and other chapters originally written for ADwD have been held over for Winds. In fact we know this is happening because in that recent interview with his editor she mentioned that they'd had to sort out some of the story arcs because Winds is already overruning - not that its finished by any means, there's presumably still a lot of detail and last minute changes, but yes on the day Winds is published there should already be a substantial part of Dream already written


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I'd be inclined to think that although the two books are not being written in parallel, I would expect the Dream of Spring to be complete comparatively soon after Winds of Winter. First at this stage in the game we should be starting to move towards a resolution with diverging threads coming together. Secondly I understand that GRRM concentrates on single POVs and will write, say, several Tyrion chapters one after the other and then weave them into the other POVs later rather than writing the book in the order in which we read it. It follows therefore that when the guillotine comes down to "finish" Winds of Winter he will have several chapters in hand left for Dream, just as the battles and other chapters originally written for ADwD have been held over for Winds. In fact we know this is happening because in that recent interview with his editor she mentioned that they'd had to sort out some of the story arcs because Winds is already overruning - not that its finished by any means, there's presumably still a lot of detail and last minute changes, but yes on the day Winds is published there should already be a substantial part of Dream already written

Yes, but this has been the case after each book release. Nothing new. Still I hope it translates to a quicker ADOS as you suggest.

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I'd hate for the show to spoiler the books. Even if you don't watch the show, you'll hear bits and pieces from other people or the internet. The books are the basis, they should respect it that they come first (literally and figuratively). On the other hand though, money and contract.


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I've said this before but I feel it's worth saying again... just because GRRM told D&D his intended ending for the major characters and the major plot lines, doesn't necessarily mean they'll keep to them. In season 1 I'd have thought saying such a thing was ridiculous, but as the seasons wear on and it becomes less and less faithfully adapted, well... I believe they'll do what they feel is best for their show and the (majority) of their fans, whether or not that keeps in line with GRRM's vision will be incidental. :dunno:

As for the OP's question, I think it's more likely that there's a chance the final two may be closer together in release dates (hoping at least :D) but probably not the same exact time. Can't wait to find out though!

You know, they might end up doing this. Who knows what the true ending holds, but there is a lot of potential for it to be an ending that pisses off the substantially more rabid show audience which they might want to avoid. Fan service & all that. Ideally they wouldn't, but *shrug*, you never know.

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The writing is on the wall - the show will spoil the books. It already has, really.

(See the Mercy chapter, Craster's sons)



But so what? Is that all we get out of these books - shocking twists and surprises? i think there's a lot more to ASOIAF than that.



I'm willing to bet most of us have re-read the series more than once. Why would we do that since every time after the first we knew what was going to happen? Add this to the fact that the show is and will continue to significantly diverge from the books and so what if the show passes the books? It's more or less highly produced fan fiction at this point, isn't it?



Now for the general reader who just wants the cliffs notes version of the plot, yes I agree they will never pick up the novels after the show finishes the series. But aren't those of us on this forum more serious fans than that?




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I know it might sound ludicrous to some but I have found myself wondering recently if there is a possibility that GRRM is finishing both books at same time.

No. It's not possible. If it were true, he has managed to keep it a secret from his publisher and editor. His editor, Anne Groelle, has recently reported only 168 manuscript pages submitted so far, and, to her knowledge, one additional chapter that he has not submitted.

I read somewhere that GRRM has said that the winds of winter has been an easy book to write so far compared to some of the previous books

You misheard. He merely mentioned that he had not YET encountered similar problems. However, he has apparently not YET done a very significant amount of writing, much beyond the 200 odd pages he had left over from A DANCE WITH DRAGONS three years ago (of which he has only submitted 168 in September 2013, which was still all he had submitted as of last month). So really, he has barely had an opportunity to encounter problems, YET.

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No. It's not possible. If it were true, he has managed to keep it a secret from his publisher and editor. His editor, Anne Groelle, has recently reported only 168 manuscript pages submitted so far, and, to her knowledge, one additional chapter that he has not submitted.

You misheard. He merely mentioned that he had not YET encountered similar problems. However, he has apparently not YET done a very significant amount of writing, much beyond the 200 odd pages he had left over from A DANCE WITH DRAGONS three years ago (of which he has only submitted 168, as of September 2013). So really, he has barely had an opportunity to encounter problems, YET.

I thought that was as of October 2012, as per this quote from Wikipedia, and that he'd written more: "By October 2012, 400 pages of the sixth novel had been written, although Martin considers only the first 200 as "really finished", the rest still needing revisions."

Wikipedia also states that he had 100 pages done (out-takes from ADWD) before he started working on TWOW, which was in January 2012, I believe, so that would seem to be indicating that he wrote 300 (unrevised) pages in 9 months. At that rate, by my calculations, he ought to have written approximately 1000 pages (only some of which is revised) by now, possibly more as he seems to be not working on as many side projects as before.

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I thought that was as of October 2012, as per this quote from Wikipedia, and that he'd written more: "By October 2012, 400 pages of the sixth novel had been written, although Martin considers only the first 200 as "really finished", the rest still needing revisions."

This is a misquote. In July 2012 in a Spanish interview, GRRM said that he had a couple of hundred pages in a "more or less finished state" and "probably an equal amount" in very rough first draft from that is going to require alot of revision before it is usable. Here's a chronology.

June+ July, 2010: 5 finished, submitted chapters (Arya, Sansa, 2 Arianne's and an Aeron) are bumped to Winds. Winds already has 100 submitted manuscript pages at this point.

May, 2011: After finishing Dance, GRRM said he was at nearly 1700 pages (though he did not say all of it was in completed submitted form), eliminated 80 pages from editing, and bumped the rest to Winds, resulting in a 1510 page manuscript. Do the math, and you have another hundred pages, more or less.

Fall, 2011, he says he has 100 pages. This evidently refers to SUBMITTED pages (the 5 chapters from July, 2010).

July, 2012 Barcelona: GRRM says he has circa 200 pages in a "more or less finished state". This evidently includes the 100 page from the 5 submitted chapters (the "more finished" pages) and the 100 pages from the chapters bumped at the very end (the "less finished pages"). He also said he had "probably an equal amount" in very rough first draft form that is going to require alot of revision. This most likely refers, in the main, to material left over from 10 years earlier, when he had tried to leap over the 5-year gap (he has said elswhere that, as of the end of aDwD, he had begun to catch up with post 5-year gap material).

October, 2012: "Adria's News" publishes a phony interview which is really a more-positive misquoting and rewording of a number of Spanish interview from July. It is mainly fraudulent, and should not be relied upon. This seems to be where you are getting your quote from.
February, 2013: GRRM submits 168 pages to his editor. This probably includes the July 2010 Chapters (Sansa, Arya, Arianne 1, Arianne 2 and Aeron), and most of the other chapters we know of (such as Barristan 1, Barristan 2, Victarion, Tyrion 1, and Theon), but apparently does not (per Anne Groelle) include Tyrion 2.
May, 2014: As of this date, GRRM has still submitted only 168 pages, per Anne Groelle. However, she knows of at least one other Tyrion chapter (apparently Tyrion 2) which he has not submitted.

Wikipedia also states that he had 100 pages done (out-takes from ADWD) before he started working on TWOW,

This probably refers to the 5 chapters bumped in the Summer of 2010.

so that would seem to be indicating that he wrote 300 (unrevised) pages in 9 months.

I don't think so. I think the material requiring alot of revision is 10+ years old.

At that rate, by my calculations, he ought to have written approximately 1000 pages (only some of which is revised) by now, possibly more as he seems to be not working on as many side projects as before.

168 submitted pages as of May 29, 2014. He probably has some additional material (like that one Tyrion chapter) but probably not too much.

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Editing takes a huge amount of time! GRRM will revise as he writes - multiple drafts I bet per chapter ... and then his publishing editors will wade into the fray and there'll be to-ing and fro-ing between GRRM and them as well (although he's given a fairly easy ride by all accounts), all of which takes much longer than anyone involved in these processes ever hopes or expects it to! So any lead time between now and Wow's release date has to factor in editing which might even amount to months. Book design and accompanying marketing strategies also have to be decided and devised before eventual publication - that's another few weeks...



Obviously I haven't got a foggiest when WoW might come out as we have no real idea how far along GRRM is, but I think the OP's notion has a grain of possibility - GRRM is likely writing by character arc now which, in some cases, will probably take him beyond WoW. So while I doubt there will be simultaneous publication, I reckon ADoS will come out reasonably swiftly after WoW.


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The writing is on the wall - the show will spoil the books. It already has, really.

(See the Mercy chapter, Craster's sons)

But so what? Is that all we get out of these books - shocking twists and surprises? i think there's a lot more to ASOIAF than that.

I'm willing to bet most of us have re-read the series more than once. Why would we do that since every time after the first we knew what was going to happen? Add this to the fact that the show is and will continue to significantly diverge from the books and so what if the show passes the books? It's more or less highly produced fan fiction at this point, isn't it?

Now for the general reader who just wants the cliffs notes version of the plot, yes I agree they will never pick up the novels after the show finishes the series. But aren't those of us on this forum more serious fans than that?

I agree with this. The show might spoil the overall ending but I'm fully confident that ADOS will still completely blow our minds.

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I don't foresee a quick release for ADoS once the show is over. I dont think there will be any urgency. We could be waiting like David Gerrold fans anticipating A Method for Madness -- the next book in The War Against the Cthorr series. The last book came out in 1992, and Gerrold to this day gives interviews and claims he is still working on it.


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