The earliest partial in my files dates from January 2006. At that point I had 542 finished pages. Now, recall, it was June 2005 when I divided A FEAST FOR CROWS into two parallel books, and wrote my infamous (and, in retrospect, ill-considered) afterword "Meanwhile, Back at the Wall..." A FEAST FOR CROWS, as delivered, was 1063 pages in manuscript. At the time of the split, looking at all the Tyrion and Daenerys material that I'd removed, I figured I only had another 400 odd pages to go to have another book of equal length, which was likely what prompted me to say the next book would be along in a year. Famous last words, those. Never again.
Obviously, it took a lot longer than that. After I wrote that, I ended up spending much of the rest of 2005 doing promotion for FEAST. An American book tour. A Canadian book tour. A British book tour. A visit to Italy for the Lucca Games Show. All great, but all exhausting. I did get back home in between, and got some writing done, but probably not much. That page count of 542 finished pages in January 2006 could not have been much different from what I'd had in June 2005, when I split the books.
And the year or so that followed proved the folly of my prediction. The next partial I sent to Bantam is dated October 2007, and it is 472 pages long. Yes, in the year and a half between the two partials, I had managed to UNwrite some seventy pages. I was doing a lot more revision and rewriting -- and restructuring -- during this period than I was making forward progress.
But then I hit a good spell. In March 2008 I delivered another partial, and this one was 596 pages long. In May 2008, another: 684 pages this time. In December 2008, 774 pages, After that progress remained slow, but fairly steady. I won't say I wasn't still tearing things out, rewriting, restructuring, changing my mind... I was... but I was forging ahead as well, as the partials I sent to my editors testify. In September 2009, I sent them 998 pages. In January 2010 I passed the 1000 pages mark, and delivered 1038 pages. Now I was picking up some steam again. June of 2010, a partial of 1028 pages. August of 2010, 1332 pages, December of 2010, 1412 pages. By March of 2011, Kong was screeching and the biplanes were in the air, and I sent in the final partial, which weighed in at 1571 pages... but I still had some incomplete chapters, some that remained very rough, some that I didn't know whether to include or not. It was those that pushed the final count over 1600 and up near 1700 before the editorial changes and final sweat that I've detailed up above.
