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The Ultimate Winds of Winter Resource


BryndenBFish

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Put my in the camp that thinks ASOIAF will not be competed during GRRM's lifetime.

Let's look at the facts.

1) GRRM has written two ASOIAF main sequence novels in the last 17 years. Two. A Storm of Swords was published in 2000.

2) Five years from Storm to Feast (2000-2005). Six years from Feast to Dance (2005-2011). And now 7+ from Dance to Winds.

3) All this slowing down despite the facts that each book should have had significant content written for it during the attempt at the previous work. A lot of the Dany/Jon/Tyrion stuff from Dance should have been done since the decision to split the books came later. Or at least a significant portion of it. And after Dance was cut short, the Battle of Mereen, Battle of Winterfell, Jon's resolution at the Wall stuff should have already been done. Plus we had a slew of other chapters done early (Barristan, Aeron, Theon, Arrianne, Mercy, Alayne, etc).

We were assured that the fact that Dance got cut short meant that a lot of Winds was already done & a speedy next novel would come now that the 5 year gap/Mereneese knot problems were solved. Well, 7 years later...

4) During the intervening time, GRRM has delved into numerous side novels, prequels, & other projects. Whilst Winds still isn't written.

5) Looking at it a certain way, he hasn't really wrote a compete ASOIAF novel in the last 17 years. As the whole Feast/Dance fiasco shows. Since he couldn't fit all of the plot lines into one book, he split off the plots of Dany, Jon, & Tyrion into Dance, whilst events in KL & vicinity were in Feast. Thus, he could (supposedly) tell two complete stories rather than one incomplete one followed by the resolutions in the second one.

Except he didn't finish the plotlines in Dance. Jon Snow is in a cliffhanger. Dany's situaion in Mereen is far from resolved. Nor is Winterfell. Heck, even some stuff from Feast went unresolved. Cersei's trial. Brienne/Cat/Jaimie. The last book where all the storylines were included & resolved was Storm. 17 years ago. 

6) GRRM is 68. At this rate, he'll be at least 75 when Spring comes out. That's if Winds makes it out next year AND there are only two more books. And if the pace doesn't slow more.

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I'm not saying this to act entitled. GRRM doesn't owe me a thing (though his publisher is another matter). If he wants to write prequels & other stuff, he can do whatever he wants. However, my reading of the facts suggests that he hasn't really completed a complete ASOIAF novel since 2000 & the two he has completed in the intervening time were incomplete (via Dany/Jon/Tyrion not being in Feast & Dance not having resolutions of any plotlines, which was the whole reason d'etre for splitting the books in the first place). He seems more interested in writing other stuff & other projects (which do get finished). And now the show will finish first.

He's been months away for years.

I think the prudent thing to do is for GRRM to accept the fact that he needs 3 books to do it right. Finish Winds instead of trying to cram so much into it that it feels wrong. However, I think GRRM is so stale on the project that he wants to get it over in 2 books rather than three. Hence, he writes & doesn't like it & has to rewrite, etc.

 

 

 

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I have avoided spoilers from the show, but I imagine that will get even more difficult as time goes on. I mean, I don't have entertainment in my google news fee (never have), yet shit shows up in the fucking business section!

I think I may resign myself to watching a show I enjoyed for about 4 episodes just to see what's going on instead of the piecemeal shit I get in my news feed. I don't agree that 3 books are needed, if he can return to Storm quality of plot movement but you may be right youknownothingjohnsnow, 3 books would deliver more quality, the last thing I want is a tiny epilogue like we received in the WoT.

When Season 8 is finished, and we don't have a book yet, I will break down and watch the show, fast forwarding like crazy though the gratuitous crap. If Winds has been delivered by then I might be able to hold out a little longer.

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I also find it mystifying how GRRM can be "months away" from finishing the book since 2015. It's hard to understand how he can be so utterly wrong - not one time, but several times - when estimating the state of the book.

Did he decide to throw out large parts of the text and rewrite them completely? Was he never as close to the finish as he led fans to believe? Was he being over-optimistic a couple of years ago? Is he being deliberately pessimistic now to keep expectations down? Is he depressed because the series has moved ahead of the books, spoiling all the major plot twists? Is he just disorganised and unable to accurately measure his progress?

We can only speculate, of course. But it's obvious that, for one reason or another, "The Winds of Winter" is in major trouble.

The whole saga around its publication is starting to remind me of the Guns n' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" - an album that was in production so long (1994 to 2008) and postponed so many times that it became a running joke in the music industry. "Hey, 'Chinese Democracy' will be released next year!" "Har, har!" When it finally did come out in 2008, the rumour was that the studio execs had run out of patience and literally forced Axl Rose to release it, or they would pull the plug financially.

Why did it take so long? For one thing, the band underwent several lineup changes at the time until Axl Rose was the only remaining original member. Moreover, it's well-known that Rose is a perfectionist, and as one observer astutely put it: "When you give a perfectionist total creative control and no deadline, he will never get anything finished."

Maybe that is GRRM's problem, too. He can't ever finish "The Winds of Winter" because it is the penultimate book in the series, and the closer he gets to the end of the whole epic, the less able he feels to resolve all the arcs and subplots in a manner that is totally satisfying to him. So he keeps fiddling with it and fiddling with it and fiddling with it...

He is not literally suffering from writer's block, but caught in endless rewrites. That's my best explanation for the repeated "I am months away!" assertions. But again, it's all just speculation, of course.

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[mod] Just to remind people: this thread is for information about TWOW. It is not for complaining about the absence of TWOW. We don't have a thread like that.

The information given on Not A Blog has been relayed and discussed and at this point the only thing going on in this thread is speculation about GRRM's progress and other things about which nobody here knows a damn thing.

To be clear: this is not an invitation to switch the discussion to whether or not this is a good rule or whether I should close the discussion now. It's me closing the discussion now.

If you want to argue about that, contact me privately, preferably via the moderator email on my profile.

[/mod]

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  • 1 month later...
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23 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/7vn9dk/spoilers_extended_a_media_professional_in_grrms/

Alleged insider info. Make of it what you will.

@BryndenBFish believes it's likely to be legit. @Werthead Do you have anything on this?

Whoa. 

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7 hours ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/7vn9dk/spoilers_extended_a_media_professional_in_grrms/

Alleged insider info. Make of it what you will.

@BryndenBFish believes it's likely to be legit. @Werthead Do you have anything on this?

Reprinting my answer from Reddit:

 

Let's go through this.

"I work in a media industry, and I had a chance encounter with a publishing professional who works in GRRM’s outer orbit."

Unless this person was 1) Anne Groell, 2) Jane Johnson or 3) the senior executive in charge of either Bantam US or HarperCollins UK, I would immediately be very wary of what anyone else said. The publishing business is full of gossips and people "in the biz" like to say stuff from a position of authority even when it is BS.

• GRRM delivered an ~800 page manuscript to his publishers sometime in 2016.

Not impossible. As of 2015 GRRM had not delivered anything further to his publishers beyond the ~200 MS pages they had in 2013, but there's been no further news since then. GRRM has to submit additional completed MS to hit milestone payments, although given his income for the last few years without those payments, it's not the case he'll be rushing to hit those like a madman. But yes, I doubt Bantam will have been happy with him going 5 years without submitting more material.

The accuracy of that page count is another matter.

• As was apparently the the case with AFFC and ADWD, GRRM wrote the first ~75% of the TWOW relatively quickly but has since struggled to complete the smaller remaining portion.

That isn't what happened with either AFFC or ADWD. ADWD's problems ran through the entire story arcs for certain characters (Jon and Dany being the big ones, Bran to a lesser extent) and AFFC's were down to the book getting far too big; GRRM actually wrote 1,700+ MS pages for AFFC in 3.5 years (less than half the current gestation period for ADWD), but not uniformly for all the characters so that was the opposite problem.

This alone leads me to believe that your source may indeed be using his "in the biz" credentials to sound authoritative, but is actually mostly unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the ASoIaF publishing story so far, let alone what's going on behind closed doors.

• GRRM’s publishers would (obviously) like TWOW to come out shortly before or after the final season of Game of Thrones airs in 2019. But only GRRM knows if that will or will not happen, and his publishers have trained themselves to have “no expectations.”

This is pretty much stating the obvious.

• In the past his publishers would encourage him to set target deadlines, and they would periodically solicit updates from him. But their latest policy is to leave him alone until he’s done.

Again, this reflects the attitude GRRM has also taken towards public utterances in general, so is unsurprising (although both Anne and Jane have more regular contact with George than that suggests).

• The relationship between D&D and GRRM has soured since Season 5. D&D took umbrage with interviews GRRM gave regarding a controversial Season 5 episode: they felt GRRM didn’t have their backs. The following year, GRRM felt D&D took ‘not-so-subtle shots’ at him in Season 6 episodes they’d written and told colleagues he didn’t appreciate it.

This sounds like dubious gossip-mongering at best. At WorldCon 2017 in Helsinki, Benioff & Weiss were in attendance and I saw them chatting very amicably to George on several occasions, sharing jokes and so on. It might be there was some issue a few years ago, but if so it seems to have been resolved, or there was never an issue in the first place (or D&D and GRRM are professionals who don't let creative disagreements sour their public appearance).

• As he publicly acknowledged, GRRM decided to undertake a major undisclosed plot change in TWOW. Apparently this change proved more unwieldy than he anticipated and necessitated several tweaks in multiple storylines he had previously assumed wouldn’t need much revising.

This is a reasonable extrapolation based on publicly-available material. George has changed the fate of a major character, which would have likely had a cascade butterfly effect on other storylines and resulted in significant rewriting and restructuring. He did this before in Jon's ADWD story, but that only impacted really on Jon's storyline (and not all of it), whilst this sounds like a much more massive change.

• GRRM is adamant about not altering his story in reaction to the show, but has told people that TWOW will “toy with” some reader expectations that may result from watching the show.

GRRM has said this before, including that when we meet Osha again she might be a bit more like Natalia Tena than before.

Overall, the source sounds credible but some of their claims appear to be way off base. I would treat them with the utmost caution.

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Sorry for interrupting your analysis Werthead, but I just read GRRM's latest blog post (Feb. 7th, 2018) on his Not a blog-blog. He writes that he doesn't

"consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE a series either; it's one single story, being published in (we hope) seven volumes."

Is he seriously worried that he may require an additional book, or is he painting a grimmer picture here? It may just be like some people are discussing, that he has a very hard time turning a very cone-shaped expansion of material (and side stories) in his series into a converging form - i.e. tying loose threads together. Especially considering the above post which suggests that he has may have hard time writing the end of TWOW in a satisfactory manner which does this presumably.

Source: https://grrm.livejournal.com/

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To be quite honest, this looks a lot like one of those "My uncle works for Nintendo" type of posts that pop up on the Internet every so often. The only thing that keeps me from being convinced that he made it all up, is that he didn't make any outrageous claims or predictions. Usually, those kinds of posts have an element of sensation to them ("There will be an alternate evolution of Pikachu!" or the like), intended to make them spread as far and fast as possible. But this guy could basically have been making a summary of the things that have been said over the last fifteen pages in this thread, there's nothing in it that hasn't been alleged by others before.

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17 minutes ago, Dimmu Borgir said:

Sorry for interrupting your analysis Werthead, but I just read GRRM's latest blog post (Feb. 7th, 2018) on his Not a blog-blog. He writes that he doesn't

"consider A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE a series either; it's one single story, being published in (we hope) seven volumes."

Is he seriously worried that he may require an additional book, or is he painting a grimmer picture here? It may just be like some people are discussing, that he has a very hard time turning a very cone-shaped expansion of material (and side stories) in his series into a converging form - i.e. tying loose threads together. Especially considering the above post which suggests that he has may have hard time writing the end of TWOW in a satisfactory manner which does this presumably.

Source: https://grrm.livejournal.com/

What were his previous answers when someone asked him about how many books ASOIAF will have? 

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11 hours ago, divica said:

What were his previous answers when someone asked him about how many books ASOIAF will have? 

That's what I'd like to know. Still, it worries me that he still does not seem to have a clear idea if he will require additional books. I would expect that at this point (as I'm sure he has finished at least the largest part of TWOW) he would at least be able to estimate roughly how many more books are required. Perhaps he will release an intermediate book A Time for Wolves before A Dream of Spring.

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On 07.02.2018 at 8:56 PM, Werthead said:

* GRRM’s publishers would (obviously) like TWOW to come out shortly before or after the final season of Game of Thrones airs in 2019. But only GRRM knows if that will or will not happen, and his publishers have trained themselves to have “no expectations.”

This is pretty much stating the obvious.

 

Now GRRM said that Fire and Blood vol. 1 is planned for release in 2018. Which should logically mean that we won't get TWoW this year. (?)

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On 2/7/2018 at 10:43 PM, divica said:

What were his previous answers when someone asked him about how many books ASOIAF will have? 

Basically that the plan is for seven books but nothing is carved in stone. Much the same as he says above, in fact. 

ETA - of course it depends when he was asked. If you asked him in 1996 he'd have said three books. :P

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3 minutes ago, mormont said:

Basically that the plan is for seven books but nothing is carved in stone. Much the same as he says above, in fact. 

ETA - of course it depends when he was asked. If you asked him in 1996 he'd have said three books. :P

I hope it is eight books. I love reading them. 

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2 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

Hope springs eternal I guess.  Can anyone tell me, in reference to the 'insider' news, how many book pages=800 manuscript pages?  

That can vary immensely based on page margins and font sizes. For comparison, ASoS and ADWD were 1,500 MS pages, AGoT and AFFC were 1,000 and ACoK was over 1,100.

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5 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That can vary immensely based on page margins and font sizes. For comparison, ASoS and ADWD were 1,500 MS pages, AGoT and AFFC were 1,000 and ACoK was over 1,100.

Thanks.  So 800 manuscript pages would be either close to finished or slightly over 50% finished based on previous book lengths.  I suspect slightly over 50%, if I assume the 'leak' is accurate.

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1 hour ago, Cas Stark said:

Thanks.  So 800 manuscript pages would be either close to finished or slightly over 50% finished based on previous book lengths.  I suspect slightly over 50%, if I assume the 'leak' is accurate.

Indeed. However, GRRM had previously completed somewhere between 200 and 400 manuscript pages for TWoW, so if all of this was combined it would put TWoW at 1200 pages done by the end of 2016, with 1500-1600 pages as the absolute maximum.

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