GRRM sadly reveals Winds of Winter will not be released in 2018
- Thread starter shira
- Start date
TheShadowLord
Member
The answer is no one as George has said before.
Ridcully
Member
It's one thing to say it, but another to mean it. I suspect when his lifestyle starts really catching up with him, we'll see this change.
bitbydeath
Gold Member
Probably intentionally leaving it til after the show finishes.
DKehoe
Member
I'm sure if everything worked out as he'd hoped he would love to finish the books before the show. Obviously that now won't happen. He's given hints that he's not exactly been thrilled with how some of his material has been handled by the show. Like when he released the Sansa preview chapter seemingly in response to what the show was doing with her in season 5.
Kadayi
Banned
Don't worry though he'll still be touring: -
http://www.georgerrmartin.com/appearances/
/S
When book readers bemoan the fact that the ASOIAF series is never finished they need to realise that it was the combination of rabid fandom and blanket apologists for GRRMs relentless procrastination that ultimately killed it. Dude would rather have his ego stroked at cons and appearances, or work on wholly unnecessary tie-ins that ultimately makes money for his ass licking cronies at westeros.org than conclude the series. Ever since he got involved with those two 'fact checkers' after a storm of swords his productivity dropped noticeably. Before he got involved with them he was delivering a book in the series every two years, after they come on board, then it goes to five years, then six and now we are looking at eight.
The worst bit is, once he's dead they're be cashing in with all sorts of 'research' books etc, through association.
http://www.georgerrmartin.com/appearances/
/S
When book readers bemoan the fact that the ASOIAF series is never finished they need to realise that it was the combination of rabid fandom and blanket apologists for GRRMs relentless procrastination that ultimately killed it. Dude would rather have his ego stroked at cons and appearances, or work on wholly unnecessary tie-ins that ultimately makes money for his ass licking cronies at westeros.org than conclude the series. Ever since he got involved with those two 'fact checkers' after a storm of swords his productivity dropped noticeably. Before he got involved with them he was delivering a book in the series every two years, after they come on board, then it goes to five years, then six and now we are looking at eight.
The worst bit is, once he's dead they're be cashing in with all sorts of 'research' books etc, through association.
shira
Member
Spheyr
Banned
Don't forget Wild Cards
JordoftheDead
Member
Getting beyond the joke now, and I don't really mind any more.
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Kadayi
Banned
For better or worse the TV series will be the conclusion. I dare say it won't live up to the high bar that avid book readers have, and it's fair to say that absent GRRMs writing to build flesh on the backbone he gave D&D the last season suffered somewhat in terms of pacing, but it is what it is.
bitbydeath
Gold Member
I'm going to remain optimistic and hope he has already completed book 6 and is now working away on book 7 which will be released together after the series is done. ;-)
LaughingStock
Member
I'm not surprised. But i don't care anymore.
Bolivar687
Banned
We made you rich.
DKehoe
Member
Did you give him money for doing nothing? Or did you get his stories in exchange for your money, which is a fair trade. He's not saying he's no longer working on the series. Although if that's what he chose to do he'd be within his rights, as disappointing as it might be. He's a slow writer and has admitted so himself. Let him work on the books in whatever way he feels works best for him.
As Neil Gaiman said, George RR Martin is not your bitch.
andythinkpad
Member
You mean the novelization of the hit HBO show Game of Thrones? I don't give a shit lol.
Kadayi
Banned
I hate to break it to you, but ASOIAF is a story, it's not a series of stories. It's one story split into a series of books, and GRRM sold those books to readers on the inherent understanding that any author of a series does on the basis that the story would be added too and eventually concluded in a timely fashion, and as highlighted in my earlier post, GRRM was pretty prompt at turning out the books up until he got involved with the hardcore fandom.
Really? The Gaiman apology? Are people still trotting that weaksauce wankery out?
Some choice refutations from the link below: -
https://iswintercoming.com/can-anyone-care-to-refute-neil-gaiman-s-argument-t2024.html
https://www.scifinow.co.uk/blog/brent-weeks-opinion-column-george-rr-martin-is-not-your-bitch/
https://grrumblers.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/imagine-if-asoiaf-was-a-restaurant…/
https://miserableannalsoftheearth.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/george-rr-martin-is-not-my-bitch.html
When GRRM does eventually die (probably at a con from one too many fan jobs) I like to think that Gaiman from his ivory tower of infinite mediocrity looks back upon his words with some degree of self-awareness (unlikely I know) and realises that it was largely through his ill-considered endorsement that we got GRRM spending his twilight years doing inane shit like this: -
Instead of working on bringing his most famous book series to a fitting conclusion. GJ Gaiman you enabler.
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DKehoe
Member
But we haven't paid for those future stories and there was no time frame put on future instalments when past ones were released. In one of the responses to the Gaiman post the writer uses the analogy of a restaurant, but at a restaurant there is a timeframe that you can reasonably expect your meal to be delivered to you in. That's not the case with novels. Buying the previous books doesn't enter you into a legal agreement where you get the follow ups within a certain window. I'd love Winds of Winter to come out ASAP but "we made you rich" makes it seem like people think Martin needs to be devoting his every waking moment to writing Winds of Winter. It's an attitude to him that I see online no matter what he does.
How dare GRRM watch football, he should be writing The Winds of Winter.
How dare GRRM attend a convention, he should be writing The Winds of Winter.
How dare GRRM work on Wild Cards with his friends, he should be writing The Winds of Winter.
The release schedule slowing down has coincided with the story becoming a lot more complex. A Storm of Swords blew up a lot of the power structures within that world and AFFC and ADWD are about examining what happens in the wake of that. With the following two books Martin has to figure out a way to answer the criticisms of the fantasy genre he has been making within the series. If you are going to talk about things like how ruling is a lot more difficult than stories make out then your own story needs to have some kind of resolution that works through that. Writing isn't as straight forward a process as "he wrote this much in this amount of time previously so therefore he should have been able to write this much since then"
Claiming it's because Martin now engages with the fan community is a bizarre theory. He's always done that. He's always gone to conventions, taken part in meet ups and done Q&As, both online and in person. He's actually doing that stuff less now. I'm not a fan of Elio and Linda but they aren't the reason the output of the series has slowed down.
It's also worth reiterating that Martin is still actively working on Winds of Winter he's not just fucking about doing nothing. I get that people are mad over The Princess & The Queen, The Rogue Prince, The World of Ice & Fire and Fire & Blood are being released before TWOW but they are just adapted from his already existing notes so he's not creating these totally from scratch and neglecting TWOW. Also perhaps working on these projects is part of his overall process for developing TWOW, we've already seen how elements and themes from Dunk & Egg have played into ASOIAF.
Yeh, let's just keep speculating on how this guy is going to die because he's not doing the thing we want him to. That's not at all weird. If that situation were to happen I also very much doubt Gaiman would look back and think "damn, if only Martin hadn't spent his life doing what he wanted we could have had another book"
Apologies, I don't know what the picture of him with Ernest Cline is from so I can't comment on that.
Kadayi
Banned
Is English not your first language or something or do you not understand the concept of singular versus plural? There is only one story. It has many characters, but it is one story, and plenty of people have invested their time and money into it on the basis that GRRM would put the effort and focus on putting it out in a timely fashion just like every other author whose announced a series. It's well known that GRRM only writes when he is at home because he uses a desktop DOS-based WP, so every time he's away doing anything else he's sure as shit not advancing his storyline.
Please, his public Mea Culpa's have been simply been a clarion call so useful idiot 'GRRM can do no wrong' low IQ enablers will defend his infamous procrastination, and it works like a charm every fucking time. He begs for forgiveness on one hand over yet another delay like a reticent alcoholic and then next week you'll find him propping up the bar pontificating at a 3 day Con, getting embroiled in internet BS or making cameos in garbage like in Sharknado 3.
As for his interactions with the gruesome twosome not impacting his output whom exactly are you hoping to convince? He's written one sidebar ASOIAF companion book with them already and has another one coming out later this year and another in the works after that. If you can't recognise that those two worthless money leeches are the worst thing to happen to both him and the book series you need your head examined. You think they're in it because they're true fans? The original idea was that they wanted to make an RPG based off of the world of the books, that's why they went deep into the lore.
https://www.salon.com/2014/04/28/me...knows_westeros_better_than_george_r_r_martin/
What's to speculate? The life expectancy on grossly obese 70-year-olds isn't particularly great and given we are looking at 8 years now before we get TWoW the odds of seeing ADoS before he either his croaks, suffers a stroke or succumbs to dementia are increasingly slim.
Personally, I don't expect him to wrap it up, and that's on him really (he played himself) Next year the show concludes and like it or not, that's the ending we get.
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DKehoe
Member
I should have said future books yes, apologies for that.
I get frustrated with how long he takes and how he sometimes chooses to spend his time and energy too. But I find the entitled reactions from some of the fanbase much worse. It's ultimately his time to use as he sees fit.
I totally see your points that there are various ways in which he should have handled this better. Like many others I groaned when he announced that he would be putting out another Targ history short story. But I just don't think it's fair to expect him to spend all of his time working on a particular project like some expect him to do. Even if that project is the one I'd most like him to be working on too. The guy can't even blog about his other interests without people demanding TWOW and being outraged that he would dare do anything other than work on it.
I actually hadn't realised that work on World of Ice & Fire had begun in 2008. I'd thought it was after ADWD came out. So you may well be on to something with that. But I still think the main cause of the delay for TWOW has been another Meereenese knot style situation where he isn't sure how to resolve the more complex situations he has now written himself into. Also that as previously mentioned he's just a slow writer generally.
Kadayi
Banned
I thought Mass Effect 3 was lacklustre on many fronts, but I didn't demand that Bioware rewrite it or some such. That a small subset of the fanbase did, however, doesn't invalidate the criticisms that exist of the game itself. One has to parse these things. GRRM set up the expectation of regular timely sequels to the series with the first three books (one every two years), that he's fallen into a morass of his own making by needlessly complicating a narrative that in all honesty probably didn't to be expanded from seven to twenty-four character viewpoints when all is said and done is by the by. Even if AWFC took 5 years, he should have taken steps to reign things in with ADWD.
I don't think anyone expects him to be chained to a desk 24/7, but given how utterly turgid the last two books in the series have been compared to the first three, there is the sense that some major course correcting is required by GRRM and the repeated delays don't necessarily inspire confidence that he's going to tighten the narrative versus complicate it even further with more viewpoints given his occasional talk of two more books rather than one.
He wasn't until he got involved with Elio and Linda. He was turning out books on a regular basis, even when he was still jobbing as a Television writer. In whose interest at the end of the day is all of this world building for? Who ultimately is going to benefit from it?
Mult-tasking is BS. The idea that you can juggle a series of complicated projects with any degree of efficiency is grade A bunk, especially when it comes to any form of creative endeavour: -
https://johnspencerellis.com/proven-5-reasons-multitasking-bs/
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