George R.R. Martin, notoriously slow writer. J.R.R. Tolkien, notoriously slow writer. Do authors with the middle initials of R.R. constantly get derailed?
Sidetracked.
:smack:
Still, Tolkien had his day job as an excuse.
Robert RR Jordan?
I mean, Martin is bad enough, but some of us are waiting for a series to be finished from beyond the grave. The amazing thing is that it seems to be working. Very well.
Yeah, ironic that Jordan’s death seems to have sped up the end of the series.
Martin just needs a good slap. At this rate the HBO series is going to catch up with him before he ever published the next book.
David GeRRold’s next Chtorr book is somewhat late too.
Funny you should suggest this. My friends were at ConQuest last weekend where GRRM took about two hours to read a chapter from his book (which was about Tyrion on his way to meet up with Dani) and answer questions. Oh, and they bought the just released Song of Ice and Fire…um…Dungeons and Dragons game? Seriously they spent 4 hours that evening rolling dice for stats and carving out an island fortress with a whole back history. It’s just like D&D. Seems somewhat interesting.
Anyway…I always thought that the reason we weren’t getting A Dance with Dragons was some sort of combination of writers block and extreme perfectionism coupled with a seriously lack of motivation.
I still believe that’s the case, but you can add one more thing into the mix. Originally, GRRM’s plan was to bring this book 5 years into the future. Five years had passed throughout the land and he’d continue on with the story.
The problem was that while that worked for many of the characters, there were just too many central ones where it became unbelievable that nothing of substance had happened in the ensuing 5 years. And while it was possible to fill in those gaps with people saying “remember when this happened…” or other flashbacks, GRRM found that it was a really crappy way to tell the story.
So he scrapped it. Threw it out. Or modified it so completely as to pretty much write over the entire book.
And that’s why it’s taken so long. Maybe.
I guess the ironic thing is that if the characters aged in real time, they’d all be literally 5 years older since the last book.
That’s the series I was coming in to mention. 
Book 1: 1983
Book 2: 1985
Book 3: 1989
Book 4: 1993
Book 5: Still waiting…
The current claim is that it’s expected next year. I’ll believe it when I see it. I don’t remember enough of the first four to really want to get into it if it ever does show up. Especially since who know when books six and seven (the planned end of the series) may ever be published.
I’d like for it to come out. I paid good money to be a named corpse in the next book. If there is no next book I’ll be contacting Mr. Gerrold for a refund. I don’t want to do that, he seems like a nice guy from the little correspondence I’ve had with him.
I gave up on these when Gerrold went off the deep end, plot-wise. The first two were good, the third was iffy, and book 4 stunk.
The series I really want an end to is Pournelle’s Janissaries books. Even with Steve Stirling helping out it’s taking decades.
As for Martin’s little saga…I own all of the books so far in First Edition, signed. I may have to choke him with them at Comic-Con.
I’m luckier than most. I discovered this serie only last year. I was hugely dissapointed to discover that only about half of the story had been published yet, but still, I haven’t been waiting for years for it (on the other hand, I began reading a comic/graphic novel I liked in my early 20s, I’m now 45 and still waiting for the last tomes. 5 have been published over those 20+ years, and I guesstimate that about 3-4 are due to end the story. There’s a good chance either the author or I will be dead before).
A more general rant : It seems that nowadays no author of fantasy is able or willing to write a story in less than a dozen tomes. Many seems to just write never-endind stories. I essentially gave up reading this genre for this reason. I want a novel to be coherent and have a beginning and an end. I’m unaware of any other kind of litterature where authors can’t manage to tell their stories in one book, two or three at most.
(and if you’re wondering why I’ve nevertheless began reading R.R. Martin, that would be because it was recommanded by a coworker, available at my employer’s library, and I didn’t have much to do at my workplace last year. I kept on reading because I liked his grim style, a pleasant change when compared with most fantasy published)
I care only about Littlefinger, Sansa, Jaime, Brienne, and the Hound, and I couldn’t care less about Jon, Tyrion, or Dany, so I’m not waiting for the next book. No, I’m waiting for the book after that.
I’ve had to accept that I will never, ever see that book.
Also: Finish the Book, George
Been there, done that.
I was a follower of Farmer’s five book Riverworld “trilogy”, and had to wait six years between the second book and the third.
You might like Erikson then, who was referenced above - they’re often equated with each other in that respect. And barring disaster Erikson is going to finish his series, he’s on the last volume now and as noted he has been the anti-Martin in terms of his production. The man apparently does nothing other than write.
Of course might is the operative word. His style is quite different from Martin’s in other respects.
I have been waiting for ever for Scott Lynch to finish the third in his Gentleman Bastard series and I’ve almost given up any hope that Patrick Rothfuss will ever publish the rest of his Kingkiller trilogy. So I feel your pain.
Maybe there will be a whole load of books published this autumn…
yep. Here I was all gleeful that An Echo in the Bone would wrap things up. But nooooo … (and how long did we wait for that?) It’s been so long since I started the series that I’ve had to start over just to re-acquaint myself with the characters.
Personally I’d just go ahead and read them and accept that the series will never finish. That’s actually less of a problem then you’d think, since after the first book Song of Ice and Fire pretty quickly becomes a bunch of loosely related vignettes that take place in the same universe and with overlapping characters. There isn’t much in the way of over-arching plot, those introduced in the first book seem to peter out over the series, and there isn’t really a central protragonist either. If Martin dies tomorrow, I don’t think the series will actually loose much for not having an official “ending”.
Wait, I read Sandkings in Omni magazine, back in 1979. At the end of it the son-of-a-bitch protagonist was being bodily picked up and carried off by some sandkings who all had HIS FACE. :eek:*
Personally, I found that to be a very satisfactory ending to the story, and it never occurred to me to want to read more about the disgusting little critters. Why did the author, I wonder?
*Spoiler, schmoiler. The story is over thirty years old, ffs.
Not to defend GRRM (or Jordan, since i think he had a similar strategy) at all, since it annoys the hell out of me as well, but I found it increasingly obvious that he doesn’t intend on finishing the series. The fans all figured out the big mystery anyway, confirming it for them would just be anticlimatic.
He’s managing the story just like a TV series, which is his background. It’s all about the journey, not actually wrapping it up. He’s trying to keep us hooked as long as he can, and then wrap it up only after it ceases to be a cash cow for him. The scheduling of books all confirms this. There is no way he can release a book even every two years. IIRC, it’s something like 2 years before the paperbacks even come out. He needs a couple of years to pimp the hard cover and a couple of more years to pimp the softcover as he pimps the next book. He needs a minimum of 4 years between books to get maximum exposure for each book a long the way.
When you think about it, the story is his career for him. Once it’s done, it’s done. Why would he wrap it up until he’s ready to retire?
At least SM Stirling still seems to be churning ahead on The High King of Montival.