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Publishing lead time


Col Cinders

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1 hour ago, aFeastForDragons said:

Took a break from these forums for a year or two, just jumping back in since I saw GRRM advertising the new ASOIAF calendar.

 

If TWOW didn't come a few years ago then its not coming out. The fact he has zero problems writing 4-5 prequel stories for HBO tells us his work on ASOIAF has ground to complete halt. He has been struggling to write this book for 10-15 years now, letting slip he had not even wrote the part about Shireen yet on his blog when the show spoiled it. 

 

So much potential for an epic 7 book series but he really began to lose his way by the 4th book and has struggled since. Just being a realist but there is minimal chance of seeing TWOW in 3-5 years time, let alone the final move if that can even tie up the story. :(

Don't be pessimist, book will came this year. 

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29 minutes ago, Big Daddy said:

So they need at least a few months of lead time from when they get the final version out of GRRM's clutches, to when they can release the final product to stores and into customer's hands. What is that, 3-4 months? Roughly? This week, the big rumor was that the publishing date might have accidentally slip and it was a September date. I have real doubts that was real and could have been for the first half of the two Taryaryen history books instead.

My fear is that Martin has emotionally moved on from ASOIAF and will continue to make pitches for other tv shows, and sprinkle more satelite ASOIAF projects like the short stories he has done in recent years. That somewhere in his house under a pile of clutter lies his abandoned work on Winds, and he never made it past 200-300 pages.

September 2020?  Maybe.  September 2018.  No way.  He seems to think he can get Fire and Blood out this year, so I guess it could have been that--presumably his publishers would like to get something out while GOT is still running.  I doubt that too, though.

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21 hours ago, Big Daddy said:

So they need at least a few months of lead time from when they get the final version out of GRRM's clutches, to when they can release the final product to stores and into customer's hands. What is that, 3-4 months? Roughly? This week, the big rumor was that the publishing date might have accidentally slip and it was a September date. I have real doubts that was real and could have been for the first half of the two Taryaryen history books instead.

My fear is that Martin has emotionally moved on from ASOIAF and will continue to make pitches for other tv shows, and sprinkle more satelite ASOIAF projects like the short stories he has done in recent years. That somewhere in his house under a pile of clutter lies his abandoned work on Winds, and he never made it past 200-300 pages.

4

He said that he had around 200 pages for TWoW ready way back in 2010, so this is very dubious.

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22 hours ago, Big Daddy said:

So they need at least a few months of lead time from when they get the final version out of GRRM's clutches, to when they can release the final product to stores and into customer's hands. What is that, 3-4 months? Roughly? This week, the big rumor was that the publishing date might have accidentally slip and it was a September date. I have real doubts that was real and could have been for the first half of the two Taryaryen history books instead.

My fear is that Martin has emotionally moved on from ASOIAF and will continue to make pitches for other tv shows, and sprinkle more satelite ASOIAF projects like the short stories he has done in recent years. That somewhere in his house under a pile of clutter lies his abandoned work on Winds, and he never made it past 200-300 pages.

Oh man, just thinking about there only being like 200 pages makes me feel so depressed. I can just imagine him passing by his dust-collecting computer, and looking at it in with an anxious face. Quickly leaving of course, because he has a new calendar to help design.

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16 hours ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

He said that he had around 200 pages for TWoW ready way back in 2010, so this is very dubious.

But he has admitted before that he has typed hundreds of pages only to later scrap some or all of them after further reflection. If he is working on it like he said he has been (which I don't believe he is), then re-writing and scrapping hundreds of pages multiple times is the only excuse on why the book isn't out yet.

ADWD was released July 12th, 2011. He is claiming TWOW will be around 1500 manuscript pages. Between July 13th of that year and today, there have been 2388 days. We're talking six tenths of a page a day. For manuscript pages that is not a lot of words. And considering a decent number of pages were already written for Winds when Dance was published, it's probably more like a half a page a day, or fewer. So the only way it makes sense, if he is writing, is if he scrapped hundreds and hundreds of pages likely multiple times.

But based on all that math, I don't think he's writing at all. The Tortoise and the Hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Eventually, the slow tortoise wins. But what if the tortoise just stopped half way through? Different story.

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1 hour ago, SuperMario said:

But he has admitted before that he has typed hundreds of pages only to later scrap some or all of them after further reflection. If he is working on it like he said he has been (which I don't believe he is), then re-writing and scrapping hundreds of pages multiple times is the only excuse on why the book isn't out yet.

ADWD was released July 12th, 2011. He is claiming TWOW will be around 1500 manuscript pages. Between July 13th of that year and today, there have been 2388 days. We're talking six tenths of a page a day. For manuscript pages that is not a lot of words. And considering a decent number of pages were already written for Winds when Dance was published, it's probably more like a half a page a day, or fewer. So the only way it makes sense, if he is writing, is if he scrapped hundreds and hundreds of pages likely multiple times.

But based on all that math, I don't think he's writing at all. The Tortoise and the Hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Eventually, the slow tortoise wins. But what if the tortoise just stopped half way through? Different story.

That's kind of what I was getting at. That he hasn't been writing it and it's just the material left over from Dance that's been sitting there collecting dust for years. 

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On 1/19/2018 at 8:02 PM, The Coconut God said:

@SuperMarioI did. The thread I made about it is linked in my signature, but the main idea is that the Others cannot be stopped. They will roll over most of Westeros quickly, forcing the main players, starting with Jon, to lead their people across the Narrow Sea, where their story will eventually merge with Dany's conquest of Essos. The "Dream of Spring" will be about Essos trying to achieve a new balance after a refugee crisis, a continent-wide slave revolt and a brutal, Dothraki & dragon powered unification, with Westeros nothing but an icy cautionary tale.

I'm afraid I find myself agreeing with @SuperMario here. The theory-building in the classic sense of the term, "what does this piece of text imply for the direction the series is heading?" has been exhausted years ago. An author can be brilliant and write clever twists, but if clues to the further development of the story is hidden in already-published text, it can't be practically hidden from thousands of obsessed fans reading every book several times, then devoting weeks of their spare time to discuss the meaning of every paragraph in them. The forum has been circling around the same discussions for years now (there have been 165 twenty-page threads on R+L = J already), and it's mostly old people saying the same stuff over again, or new people stumbling across the same old clues.

What is left now is the stuff you have in your signature. Wild guesses as to the end-game of the saga, based more on flights of fancy than clues and foreshadowing. It might be a decent guess, but it's a total shot in the dark. The solid foundations to base theories upon have long since been exhausted.

I think the series is big, popular, and well-written enough that these forums can be sustained indefinitely by new people coming in to discuss the clues they've found for their first time. But after a few years of discussions, there isn't that much more to talk about. It's a series of finite size, after all. ASOIAF won't go away any time soon, but longtime fans might. I find myself checking these forums less and less often, and it's kind of disheartening to see that the threads on TWoW information sit dormant for years without anything happening. It's nice to see that the General subforum still has so much activity in it, but it's nothing I haven't seen variations of before. It's not really a place for me to enjoy any more.

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@Kyll.Ing. I disagree that the Essos hypothesis is a shot in the dark. I'm not going to claim that it absolutely has to be true, but it connects with the existing text fairly well. It would explain the pacing of Dany's story, as well as the focus on Essos in ADwD. And it would be a very realistic step for Jon to take if the Others invade, given the precarious situation the North will be in after the Ides of Marsh and the Battle of Ice, a step that also blends smoothly with minor plot points like Tycho Nestoris, the Manderly Fleet, the wildling slaves freed in Braavos and Justin Massey's impending departure to the same city with Fake Arya. Speaking of Arya, this would also be a seamless way of bringing her back into the main story. If you think about it, it just makes sense. I did a partial re-read of Feast and Dance last summer and I was unable to find anything that can't be worked around this scenario.

And if you accept it as plausible, we're not just talking about one theory anymore. It's a paradigm shift that opens the door to a lot of other theories. For example, people didn't analyze the minutiae of Dany's conquest of Essos because in a world where Dany had to reach Westeros for the series to end this conquest was either impossible, or a sign that the series was out of control and George would require who knows how many books to finish... but if I am right it makes all the sense in the world to analyze this, and it's all the theories about Dany reaching Westeros that are unfounded.

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