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Given how big TWOW will be should it be released in two volumes?


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13 hours ago, James Arryn said:

Personally, while I think the last season of the show was mostly terrible, I think one of the many reasons it made GRRM less likely to finish is because it revealed just HOW many different agendas/endings fans were heavily invested in, meaning that any ending is going to disappoint/outrage a huge chunk of the fan base no matter how well done. Like I think the show’s ending was kinda doomed to disappoint anyways, and D&D just put that on steroids. 
 

So I think GRRM saw that and now anticipates something similar with the books. I also think that’s why the books have been progressively less well received since the show exploded the fan base/discussions. 

I've wondered about this as well.  Although fans who have not read the books weren't looking for anything other than entertainment.  They weren't looking for any hints, clues or validation.  My niece loved the show.

I'm sorry HBO didn't go ahead with Blood Moon/Long Night.  It seems there is more of an appatite for dragons. Its certainly safer and  avoids all the contoversy.  Its not really what interests me though. 

So yes, I can see Martin putting the books on hold for the reasons you state. 

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17 minutes ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

I didn’t read the books until 2014, but I vaguely remember there being a small number of people who never thought we’d see Winds. Were there people back in 2011 predicting that TWOW would never come out?

IIRC, there were people who thought that the series would never be finished even before ADWD came out. The earliest signs I remember seeing were from 2008/2009.

Edited by Takiedevushkikakzvezdy
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@The Bard of Banefort I hesitate to use quotes, because there has been so much written about this over the years that it's hard to tell actual info from hearsay, but when ADWD came out in 2011, George managed to calm people down somewhat by basically promising that with the Meereenese Knot behind him, he would finish the last two books "much faster" than FeastDance ("around 3 years each", according to Wikipedia at the time). I was new to the fandom back then, so I believed all that, because I assumed that the author would know better than anyone else where he was in terms of progress. I know that it's used as a pejorative nowadays, but I was truly a sweet summer child. 

Edited by Takiedevushkikakzvezdy
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I feel like I am being tricked into false hope.  Ever so often, I completely give up on Winds ever being released, only for George to come out and say that he is making progress.  I am not falling for it anymore.  In my opinion, the only reason he is saying this is because he wants die hard fans to watch the new HBO shows.  I will not be watching these shows, and will instead spend my money reading books from other fantasy authors.

I would prefer to not be so jaded and bitter about this, but it’s infuriating when other fantasy authors, like Sanderson, are not only continuing to release new books, but actually have “secret” books they have written.  For the record though,  George is a much better writer.  Sanderson’s writing is too PG for me.

Edited by Rubicante
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On 4/6/2022 at 4:11 AM, The Bard of Banefort said:

How active is George online though? Surely he would have known about the backlash through TV/interviews/emails, but would he really know about the overblown reaction to season 8 that we saw online? 

 

One sentiment that I agree with is that FnB and DnE don’t actually take away from him writing Winds because it seems more like the sort of thing he does for fun when he’s having writer’s block. That’s probably why he’s already so far into FnB2.

I'm sure he knows.  There are people close to George who made clear how unimpressed they were by Season 8.

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On 4/6/2022 at 5:11 AM, The Bard of Banefort said:

One sentiment that I agree with is that FnB and DnE don’t actually take away from him writing Winds because it seems more like the sort of thing he does for fun when he’s having writer’s block. That’s probably why he’s already so far into FnB2.

I will be at liberty to strongly disagree:

- While Churchill did paint, write history and garden in between politicking, I have never heard someone use "change is rest" thing with two activities so similar as writing the two works in the same universe.

- It is conceivable some writer could hypothetically do that, Martin is not that writer since he for one explicitly said he doesn't really enjoy the process of writing.

- Some do write practice pages where you write more or less nonsense when you have writer's block, it wouldn't help you to do serious writing because you are focused on that other writing and brain can't unconsciously come up with solution to the block or the hangup in the text.

-  It's doubly bad for someone who is obnoxious about editing, rewriting and reediting like Martin is. He is now probably procrastinating on the work he took on as a form of procrastination to avoid working on TWOW.

- There is no alternative to putting the hours in, if he wants to finish TWOW, he has to write it, best way to do it is single-minded focus. Short breaks for socializing or hiking could maybe help him be more productive, break for writing another book most certainly can't.

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Answering the initial question of the topic, George detailed the process of determining if a book is too long for publishing in a blog post.

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2011/05/19/talking-about-the-dance/

To be short, it all depends if the manuscript surpasses the 1600 to 1700 pages threshold, after this it is impossible to physically put together everything in one book. George claimed to had already written hundreds of pages and that he needs to write hundreds more to finish the book properly and Lord knows how many hundreds of pages it means.

About the delay, I am frustrated as well. I believe George will finish Winds of Winter even if takes time, I am not so optimistic about A Dream of Spring though, even with George claiming he have everything figure out.

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7 hours ago, SeanBeanedMeUp said:

I always insist that GRRM should increase the size of his pages so he can stuff more words into them without shrinking the font. Even if it requires a whole new type of book to be released I will take it if it means getting Winds in one piece.

Or take full advantage of digitalization and E-books, so he doesn't have to worry about the page count.

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  • 3 weeks later...

for me, there's more than one reason to be happy about the latest blog post :) 

"THE WINDS OF WINTER is going to be a big book.   The way it is going, it could be bigger than A STORM OF STORMS or A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, the longest books in the series to date.   I do usually cut and trim once I finish, but I need to finish first."

sooo, I know there is still hundreds of more pages and it doesn't mean Winds is anywhere close to being finished , but he wouldn't write that if he wasn't close in length to Dance , which is a lot! right?   

then :

"I saw rough cuts of a couple more episodes of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, and was just as pleased as I was with the earlier episodes.   Ryan and Miguel and their cast and crew are doing great work.    Those of you who like complex, conflicted, grey characters (as I do) will like this series, I think.   There will be plenty of dragons and battles, to be sure, but the spine of the story is the human conflicts, the love and the hate, character drama rather than action/ adventure."

grey characters ... that's exactly what I've been worried about! if George is happy with season 1 and thinks it's more than dragon fight then I'm happy as well!

"There’s more, there’s more, there’s always more.   But that will need to do for now."

and this is just the most hopeful thing George has written in his last posts...

 

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5 hours ago, Roughspun said:

a bit of news in the newest blog post:

So, currently it isn’t even over the size limit!

Not really. According with George at one point Dance was almost 1700 pages long, but he edited things back to 1510 pages. His quote can mean anything, he might be hundreds of pages far from finishing or he could surpassed the size limit and be close to fthe end, it is impossible to know for certain.

Edited by Arrow of the Morning
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12 hours ago, Arrow of the Morning said:

Not really. According with George at one point Dance was almost 1700 pages long, but he edited things back to 1510 pages. His quote can mean anything, he might be hundreds of pages far from finishing or he could surpassed the size limit and be close to fthe end, it is impossible to know for certain.

The guy has burnt us so many times, with these false hopes and promises, you're right, it's probably impossible to predict. For all we know he can be stuck on the proper way for Dany to meet Tyrion and be stuck rewriting it 3 or 4 times, like he did Dany's first meeting with Quentyn, for some daft reason.

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6 minutes ago, sifth said:

 For all we know he can be stuck on the proper way for Dany to meet Tyrion and be stuck rewriting it 3 or 4 times, like he did Dany's first meeting with Quentyn, for some daft reason.

IIRC, the issue was whether Quentyn, Marwyn or Tyrion was supposed to meet Dany first, which of course affects the story. 

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10 hours ago, SeanBeanedMeUp said:

Does it mean he’s close? I want to believe he’s close…

Or it could mean he has managed to set up an arc for the POV characters, and is tallying in his head: "To resolve all of this, I need five more chapters featuring Daenerys, six or seven more with Jon, four with Bran, eight with Brienne if I decide to go for that side arc ..." and so on for all his POV characters, and concluding that there will be a whole lot of chapters left to write even if some of them feature multiple of the characters. And then there's deciding whose POV to use in those cases, and in which order characters will meet ...

That is not to say he is necessarily far from finished. The above is a sort of worst-case scenario. It's just that the statement is consistent with pretty much every interpretation on the scale from "the book is almost finished" to "he has only drafted a rough outline". In short, we could read anything into it, and thus should read nothing into it.

Edited by Kyll.Ing.
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