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Bumping for TWOW V4

Kikajon

By Kikajon,
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honeyed chicken Council Member

honeyed chicken

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bump

So this is a rather extended ramble on my belief that TWOW is actually done and sitting in somebody's office right now as we speak, merely awaiting release with its parallel season of Game of Thrones next spring. Being lazy, I copied and pasted all this from an email I sent to a friend and fellow Westerosi:



I did some online snooping the other day and have come up with more fuel for my belief that will see TWOW in the first half of next year.
One of the things I keep seeing on Westeros is that Martin writes too slowly. Here's what I have to say to that notion:
Horsebleep!
The ASOIAF timeline as we know it is that he had the idea for the book in '91 and it grew out of the Hedge Knight. In August of '96 AGOT was released.
But taking a closer look, he had other projects going between '91 and '94. In '94 (no idea what month) he hands his agent 200 pages with the idea of writing a trilogy (to consist of AGOT, ADWD and TWOW). By the end of '95, he had 1,400 manuscript pages and realized the book was going to need two trilogies with a 5 year gap (Westeros time) between the two. 1,400 pages being way too many for one book, 300 of them got rolled forward into ACOK and by '98 he handed in 1,100 pages for the book that appeared in February of '99. By early 2000 (it takes a publisher 6 to 8 months to turn a manuscript into a book ready for release) he handed his publisher 1,500 pages for ASOS that came out in October that year.
Doing the math, let's say he starts writing AOIAF in earnest in '94 to the best of our knowledge. Between January '94 and January 2000 - 5 years at the most, he generated 4,000 manuscript pages as well as basically laying down the entire story.
That is 800 pages per year! This guy writes faster than any writer I ever heard of. His production is prodigious.

While writing the next book he decided to do away with the five year gap. Thus AFFC was born. He was optimistic for a 2002 release.
But as he says in his note at the end of AFFC the book got too big for a single volume and he had to cut it in half. To me that means by '04 when he would have handed the manuscript to his publisher, he had ADWD largely written. Given what we know of his pace, it's not a stretch to think he had over 2,000 manuscript pages done at that point. Every page of ASOIAF we have now may have been written by 2005!

Wikipedia also says Martin had 5 chapters and 100 pages of TWOW done in 2010.

Then why hasn't TWOW appeared long before now?

Business, kiddies. Business.

As we know, ADWD didn't appear till 2011, the same year as the HBO series started. And we know that the show generated a massive uptick in book sales. The paperback ADWD wasn't released till October 2013 because hardcover sales remained so strong.
Martin says the delayed release of ADWD had nothing to do with the show, but - sorry, Mr.Martin - horsebleep. That statement conflicts strongly with the evidence at hand. Judge a man by his deeds (and his writing ability) not his words.
The HBO deal was signed back in 2007, but perhaps Martin's agent was shopping the book around much earlier and the negotiating with HBO started well before the deal was struck. To me the only explanation for the sudden slow down in Martin's output is the show and the extra book sales being generated when the books and show coincided.


All his trips and side projects are him trying to fill time and tap dance while waiting for the series to catch up with the books.

I believe TWOW is done and ready to release. When the corporate types think the time is propitious, they will announce a date.

I also suspect ADOS is well underway and may be done as well. The corporates will do their best to make a big mystery out of that announcement as well.

And if I'm wrong? Well, I'm just a fan, what the heck do I know? ;)

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Lady Blizzardborn Council Member

Lady Blizzardborn

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Well HC, I'm a writer myself, and I've got a trilogy the first of which came out in 2006. I still haven't finished the second book. I've started twice. Gotten stuck repeatedly, tried to force my way through (with disastrous results) and finally had to admit I needed to step away for a while and let the plot percolate some more. I don't have a Meerenese knot but I do have a timeline issue with what the heck happens during the months my missing person has to remain missing for the ending to work the way I want it to.



I've also started the third book, but I think about half of what I have is going to end up scrapped (luckily that's not a whole bunch). And I started a prequel, which like book three in the trilogy doesn't have much, but what I have on that is mostly good.



GRRM's description of his writing style sounds a lot like mine. I don't plan out what happens in this chapter and what happens in that chapter. I have the basic structure and I fill in as I go. Some people do really well with detailed outlines, I don't seem to be one of them.



It's entirely possible, once you've reached the middle of a story (or a book) to get mired. When I was writing my first novel I'd get stuck once a chapter. Took me a year to write it at that pace. But it's much shorter than these books, with a world that is pitifully under-developed by comparison, and in the years that have passed I've grown as a writer, so I now look back and think I could do better. One more draft couldn't have hurt.



Now looking at the massive series GRRM has built, along with the fact that he turns in manuscripts that only need a couple of weeks to edit--as opposed to the usual months to a year, or more--I'd say he really has been writing at the pace we acknowledge. However, I'd say he's farther along than most people realize. Saying he needs 480 more pages (per a recent interview) to make a finished book could mean 480 more finished pages. Assuming the book is at least 1500 pages that means he has 1020 pages done.



I'm thinking the first half of next year as well, but not for the same reasons you are.



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