Update on the "Winds"

[Ferocious Veldt Roarer]

Come on now. I think you know this is silly. I can handle arguments that he won't finish, that it'll take 8 books, that it'll take years and years, I don't agree but I can see the angle. But suggesting he doesn't give a fuck in a thread discussing a blog post where he emphatically stated how much of a fuck he gave ...... it's just reading what you want to read into it. He's spent probably 90% of his working time on aSoIaF since 94, therefore he doesn't give a fuck...? Nah.

That's... complicated. See, on one hand, he does care. On the other hand, he cares about several other things, too, and there's only so many hours in the day. In his previous blog entry, he mentions at least five current side projects that are important to him: three TV shows and a movie in various stages of development, plus "Wildcards", and he'd like to do even more. None of which fills me with optimism.

[Celestial]

 

Here is one thing I don't understand about GRRM post. He said that in May he thought he could do by October deadline... and then realizing in August that he couldn't make it.

But I remember in May/June (when that infamous Sansa  episode aired)  looking at his summer schedule and thinking - "June, from 12th onwards booked for traveling, July at least 1 week traveling, August from beginning till end booked for traveling... Add 1 weeks before travel to "prepare" and 2-3 weeks after travel to "recover", I don't think he'll be writing till September at all." (At the time I was assuming he'll be done by end of Feb 2016)

Everybody who followed his blog and saw his schedule for summer could figure out that he won't be writing a word till September, so why did it take HIM till August to realize that he couldn't meet October deadline. He knew his schedule better than us, he told us on his blog that he can't write when traveling, why did he even assumed that October was a realistic deadline? And then thinking that additional 2 months could give him "Breathing space" when he still had to write hundreds of pages?!

Here is a guess: he does not know how to manage his time. He does not seem to understand what one month or one year actually means or that writing is an arduous process and, when you are working on a project like ASOIF, you need to devote time to it on a daily basis for months or even years in a row if you want to get things done. A three month holiday just won't do. Not only that is a lot wasted time, but the creative flow also gets disrupted. In addition, sometimes, in order to overcome writer's block, you need to force yourself to focus on the subject - even if, say, for a week it might look you are not going anywhere, in the end there is a good chance inspiration might start to click. But if you abandon work after 1-2 dry days and go on vacation, then it never will.

[rozemarijn]

To be honest, he's talking about months, and not years. I see myself reading Winds in 2016, or in the beginning of 2017, so I can't say I am disappointed. I honestly don't care about a couple months more or less if he needs them. I can wait for it. At least now there is some information about where he is instead of guesswork and those months will fly by. 

It would have been amazing to read the book before the sixth season, but the seventh season would have spoiled the last book anyway. At least there will be some new stuff out there to discuss whether or not it will be in the books, and I look forward to those theories. 

I am also sure we'll get a new chapter, or even some chapters, at the beginning of the show. He likes to give 'his' version of things which are important to him before the show spoils them. There was Arya's revenge and a 'playing' Sansa instead of a raped one. Maybe there will be a resurrection of Jon ...

 

Ah yes, one more thing. He seems to be quite far in the book (at least over the middle) and yet he is writing a Theon chapter. Apparently someone didn't lose his head in front of that tree after all ...

 

 

 

[Ser Didymus]

Technically it's subjective, but are there really many people who believe the Daenerys, Cersei, Tryion, and Jon chapters in the last two books were eventful? They had their moments, but so little happens of importance. Tyrion, for example, goes all over the place and yet plot-wise ends up nowhere. I've joked with people that his chapters in ADWD should be called "The Wild Adventures of Tyrion Lannister."

The events from AFFC and ADWD seem "less important" because we have yet to benefit from the knowledge of the events that follow.  how TWOW (and ADOS) will continue these plots will eventually determine their importance to the larger story.  

one of the characters you mentions flies on a dragon... something that has not been done for 200 some odd years?  another character (who many believe to be a main protagonist of the series) is betrayed by the men he leads and is murdered.  another character, a queen, completely up-ends the balance of power in the capitol city only to seek redemption in the arms of a re-animated corpse.  and of course, the character who "ends up nowhere" is actually responsible for a believed-to-be-dead Prince's declaration of war to reclaim his throne.  

 

[Masha]

To be honest, he's talking about months, and not years. I see myself reading Winds in 2016, or in the beginning of 2017, so I can't say I am disappointed. I honestly don't care about a couple months more or less if he needs them. I can wait for it. At least now there is some information about where he is instead of guesswork and those months will fly by. 

It would have been amazing to read the book before the sixth season, but the seventh season would have spoiled the last book anyway. At least there will be some new stuff out there to discuss whether or not it will be in the books, and I look forward to those theories. 

I am also sure we'll get a new chapter, or even some chapters, at the beginning of the show. He likes to give 'his' version of things which are important to him before the show spoils them. There was Arya's revenge and a 'playing' Sansa instead of a raped one. Maybe there will be a resurrection of Jon ...

 

Ah yes, one more thing. He seems to be quite far in the book (at least over the middle) and yet he is writing a Theon chapter. Apparently someone didn't lose his head in front of that tree after all ...

 

 

 

sorry but GRRM didnt say that Theon chapter is one of the new ones or that he is rewriting yet again that old chapter that was cut from adwd that he posted before

[Cas Stark]

I didn't get a sense of how far he is.  I guess it depends on whether you focus on hundreds and hundreds of pages written or months and months more writing if the writing goes well.

[Ser Didymus]

I didn't get a sense of how far he is.  I guess it depends on whether you focus on hundreds and hundreds of pages written or months and months more writing if the writing goes well.

i came to my own conclusions about his percentage of completion not based on GRRM's vague statements regarding quantity, but rather on the fact that those close to the situation (including GRRM) thought the book would be ready in october 2015, only to push that date back to december 2015.  if he is more than 6 months from completion, why would they only push the deadline back 2-3 months?

[Mr Fixit]

I think there's a bunch of reasons for the delay. If I had to guess, I'd say it's this (in no particular order):

• Age -- Martin is getting older, no way around this. He's bound to have less energy than 10 or 20 years ago;
• Lack of zeal and enthusiasm -- this is pure speculation on my part, but I believe there's truth to this. We know from the original outline Martin pitched to the publishers that he has problems finishing stuff once he knows how it ends. He outright said so. The closer he is to the end. and especially having in mind that this saga has been his main preoccupation for some 20-25 years, the more burned out he gets. There are countless other non-ASoIaF story ideas kicking around in his head he'd like to put down to paper, I'd wager;
• Pressure -- there's plenty of this, sure. It can't be easy being the most famous fantasy author of this day and age, with legions of fans, colleagues, and critics waiting to see how it all ends. The looming spoilerfest that is the HBO show surely feels like a great personal defeat. To have the end of his magnum opus revealed by other people in another medium... it's gotta be devastating, to say the least;
• Lack of outline -- I get that Martin, like every other artist, has his rituals and ways of doing stuff that aren't going to change after all these years. But I can't help but feel that his "gardener" approach is getting out of control. From where I stand, AFfC/ADwD proved that you can't write books of such complexity and size without solid pre-planning and clear waypoints. His failure to do so (because his creative process demands it, or something) led to bloat, dozens of PoVs, and countless new characters and storylines that needlessly muddy the waters. Every author needs some solid foundations to build and expand on. Martin's insistence on "dealing with it" when the time comes resulted in a product of inferior quality, at least compared to the first three books that had the outline.

[ckongo]

The events from AFFC and ADWD seem "less important" because we have yet to benefit from the knowledge of the events that follow.  how TWOW (and ADOS) will continue these plots will eventually determine their importance to the larger story.  

one of the characters you mentions flies on a dragon... something that has not been done for 200 some odd years?  another character (who many believe to be a main protagonist of the series) is betrayed by the men he leads and is murdered.  another character, a queen, completely up-ends the balance of power in the capitol city only to seek redemption in the arms of a re-animated corpse.  and of course, the character who "ends up nowhere" is actually responsible for a believed-to-be-dead Prince's declaration of war to reclaim his throne.  

 

Thanks for elaborating on those "moments" I mentioned. Tyrion, for example, didn't need twelve chapters to point fAegon (a character whose late story addition I'm not thrilled with) in a certain direction.

 

Good books shouldn't require pay-offs to happen in later books to justify their stand-alone mediocrity. The first three had great pay-offs in each book but also set things up for great payoffs later. All you're doing is speculating the latter may occur. When I read something that isn't very interesting, thinking "In the next book though this build up's pay off will be great!" doesn't make the current reading any better.

[Cas Stark]

I think there's a bunch of reasons for the delay. If I had to guess, I'd say it's this (in no particular order):

• Age -- Martin is getting older, no way around this. He's bound to have less energy than 10 or 20 years ago;
• Lack of zeal and enthusiasm -- this is pure speculation on my part, but I believe there's truth to this. We know from the original outline Martin pitched to the publishers that he has problems finishing stuff once he knows how it ends. He outright said so. The closer he is to the end. and especially having in mind that this saga has been his main preoccupation for some 20-25 years, the more burned out he gets. There are countless other non-ASoIaF story ideas kicking around in his head he'd like to put down to paper, I'd wager;
• Pressure -- there's plenty of this, sure. It can't be easy being the most famous fantasy author of this day and age, with legions of fans, colleagues, and critics waiting to see how it all ends. The looming spoilerfest that is the HBO show surely feels like a great personal defeat. To have the end of his magnum opus revealed by other people in another medium... it's gotta be devastating, to say the least;
• Lack of outline -- I get that Martin, like every other artist, has his rituals and ways of doing stuff that aren't going to change after all these years. But I can't help but feel that his "gardener" approach is getting out of control. From where I stand, AFfC/ADwD proved that you can't write books of such complexity and size without solid pre-planning and clear waypoints. His failure to do so (because his creative process demands it, or something) led to bloat, dozens of PoVs, and countless new characters and storylines that needlessly muddy the waters. Every author needs some solid foundations to build and expand on. Martin's insistence on "dealing with it" when the time comes resulted in a product of inferior quality, at least compared to the first three books that had an outline.

I agree with all of this.

I get that he feels he can only write at home, but then given his lack of enthusiasm, and his travel schedule and the desire to finish before HBO, he should have tried doing something while traveling if he wasn't going to stop traveling...like an outline, like sketching out some basic framework for what he wants the main points of the book to be and maybe even outlining chapters.

Now, he has all but thrown up his hands and said, I failed, I'll do it when I do it.  Who knows what that means.

[Mr Fixit]

I didn't get a sense of how far he is.  I guess it depends on whether you focus on hundreds and hundreds of pages written or months and months more writing if the writing goes well.

I  don't know what to think, honestly. The fact that Martin at one point believed he could finish the book in only 2-3 months makes me hope that perhaps he really is close to the end. Then again, there is that infamous AFfC afterword and we all know how it turned out. I'm still flabbergasted by that one: no amount of rewriting, retooling, and revising can make me fathom how something he thought would be done in one year actually took SIX. Nothing can explain that kind of delay except him giving up on writing the damn thing for prolonged periods of time. And there's no assurances something similar won't happen again, especially now that he has to deal with the fact that the whole thing will conclude on TV first.

[Cas Stark]

Yeah, I think he has lost his passion for the story.  He may have lost it during Dance.  Everyone hoped that once all of those alleged issues, knots, gaps, etc. were resolved he would be focused again.  But, it feels like he's still lost in the garden and now it may be that he can't get out.  It's too bad.  But, I also feel he is his own worst enemy.

I just can't imagine he could only be 2 or 3 months from completing the novel and couldn't get it done.  If he was really that close, why did he spend the summer basically traveling?  Oh well.  HBO will finish the story and it will give the basic answers to the big questions, who lives, who dies.  At this point, I don't really hope for much more though I believe he will get Winds out eventually....not sure about any subsequent books.

[HokieStone]

And... remember that reference earlier to the two-year publication gap between ACOK and ASOS? Guess what? During that time, he was also doing all this stuff that people are saying is slowing him down. Other books, personal appearances, the lot. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that maybe the problem is not these other things, but genuinely problems with the writing itself.

Oh, come now.  Between ACOK and ASOS he had nowhere near the amount of fame he does now.  I had never heard of him, or of ASOIAF prior to picking up the first "Legends" book and reading the first Dunk & Egg tale, which then got me into the series.  I don't know...maybe he was financially comfortable even then...but nothing to the degree he is now, I'm sure.  He doesn't have to write another word in his life, and he'll die rich - was that true back in 2000?  There's something about needing to eat that exerts a certain pressure to work more diligently. I'm sure he went to conventions back then...but at the same pace - and locations - that he is today, jetting all over the world?  I find that extremely doubtful.  The amount of attention - and demands on his time - have likely increased exponentially since 15 years ago.

[Mr Fixit]

I think Martin doesn't know how he wants to proceed; the story isn't clear in his mind anymore, and that's why he has to constantly rewrite with this character arriving first or that character arriving first, and so on. It's all spiraling out of control and he's struggling to regain it. Maybe he succeeds. I certainly hope so. 

As for subsequent books, yeah, is there anyone who still believes it will only take 7 books? No chance in hell. We're 5 books in and we're only in the middle of Act Two, if that.

[Cas Stark]

That's why he needs an outline.  It's kind of insane to write entire chapters of so and so getting to whereever to see if it works when you could just write it as an outline..so and so is here, whatshername is over there...and this should be a much easier way decide if A or B or C will work.  But, GRRM appears to be set in his ways.

But, it gives the appearance of yes, obsessing over irrelevant details having lost the big picture.  What difference did it really make when Quentyn arrived?  He could have written the whole thing in the past tense anyway with no POV at all.  Ugh.

Yeah, 8 books.  And I now, after this latest fiasco where Winds may now take as long as Dance did....don't see him finishing things.

 

[mushroomshirt]

Ah yes, one more thing. He seems to be quite far in the book (at least over the middle) and yet he is writing a Theon chapter. Apparently someone didn't lose his head in front of that tree after all ...

 Actually he said he was revising a Theon chapter, not writing one.  He could simply be referring to a revision of the Theon sample chapter we got in 2011

I hope you are right though.  Theon's Dance chapters were amazing. I hope we get a lot more of them.

ETA:

sorry but GRRM didnt say that Theon chapter is one of the new ones or that he is rewriting yet again that old chapter that was cut from adwd that he posted before

Oops we said the same thing...

[ssls6]

Saying it will take 8 books is tantamount to saying it won't be finished in GRRMs own hand.  I can't mentally go there yet however likely it may be.   I agree 7 books don't feel like enough.  

[Werthead]

George had an outline at least twice previously. The first was the one available online, written in October 1993 when AGoT had about 160 MS pages completed for it. This was when ASoIaF was still a trilogy (AGoT, ADWD, TWoW), there was no gap and the story was conceived as simply spanning a lot more time.

He wrote a new outline in 1998, after AGoT had split into AGoT and ACoK, and when he suddenly realised ACoK was now way too big as well and had to be split between ACoK and ASoS. That's when he expanded the series to six books. What's interesting about that outline is that it still seems to have been pre-five year gap. He didn't announce the gap until he was into the writing of ASoS in 1999 or early 2000. If that outline had incorporated the gap, he might have had an easier time of it (in planning the gap he might have realised earlier it didn't work and would never have lost 12-18 months in writing the post-gap version of ADWD in 2000-01 before junking it and starting AFFC). Or maybe not. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and the 1993 outline certainly bore little resemblance to the story at that point.

After that point we have no firm information on further outlines being developed until the very rough outline he gave D&D pre-show (probably somewhere around 2008-10), and then a firmer one developed at a story summit in Santa Fe in 2013. However, I gather that that outline was developed for the TV show alone, omitting tons of stuff from the books already, and would be of limited use in writing the novels.

Should he have an outline? I would say at this point it wouldn't hurt. Peter F. Hamilton has insanely detailed outlines for each of his novels, he like spends 2-3 months writing them, and has often gone completely off course within a few hundred pages. But he says just writing the outline is helpful for when decides to do things differently. GRRM argues that it doesn't help his process, but then he's never been in the writing position he is now.

That does not change the fundamental fact that GRRM does spend the majority of his professional time on writing ASoIaF and pouring blood and more words then he needs into it (George once said that to get to the 422,000 words in the published version of ADWD he wrote between two and three times that many in drafts and partials and abandoned material; you don't write 1 million words in six years without working hard). He's actually not, and never has been, a slow writer. He is, however, a very inefficient one due to his process. Whether that process is necessary or not, or is now if it has been in the past, is another question, unanswerable without access to parallel universes.

AGoT, ACoK, and ASoS were each written 2 years from each other; 1996, 1998, and 2000. And those books are almost inarguably the best in the series, and the ones the last two have been using as a lifeline to keep readers' interest.

This is incorrect: GRRM commenced writing AGoT in 1991. It was published in 1996, but when it was published there was significant material left over for ACoK. When ACoK was completed, he had substantial material already completed for ASoS. Those three novels were originally supposed to be one, so can be viewed as one book written over nine years. Inarguably, he was writing faster than now (he took a year to a year and a half out in the early period to work on a TV show, but he also worked on outlines and other ASoIaF materials during that time), but he was also grappling with very familiar, substantial timeline and bloat issues. Somehow, those issues resolved themselves into three very fine novels. In the case of AFFC/ADWD the situation was highly more problematic.

[The One And Only]

If AFFC & ADWD were as crisply written as the first 3 books, they would have been combined into one, and TWOW would have been published in 2011.  And ADOS would be fighting the clock against the series finale....

I find it interesting that the fans who GRRM screwed over the most, are the ones defending him the most.  By allowing the show to overtake the books, he has ruined the series for the really devoted book readers.

[honeyed chicken]

 

This is incorrect: GRRM commenced writing AGoT in 1991. It was published in 1996, but when it was published there was significant material left over for ACoK. When ACoK was completed, he had substantial material already completed for ASoS. Those three novels were originally supposed to be one, so can be viewed as one book written over nine years. Inarguably, he was writing faster than now (he took a year to a year and a half out in the early period to work on a TV show, but he also worked on outlines and other ASoIaF materials during that time), but he was also grappling with very familiar, substantial timeline and bloat issues. Somehow, those issues resolved themselves into three very fine novels. In the case of AFFC/ADWD the situation was highly more problematic.