But everything he does makes me want to buy those books less.
This ^.
This is my conclusion too. It doesn’t bother me that he’s never going to finish the series, they’re his books and it’s his career and he can do whatever he wants with them. What DOES bother me is the fact he keeps making public statements about how he’s going to get them done, he’s still working on them, and if we all just wait patiently a little while longer it will be all worth it. That seems far more disrespectful towards his fans than just admitting it’s (at best) on the back burner and it won’t be done anytime soon.
Yes. Eleven years later, and he should stop teasing and just do it or stop.
I would put a large amount of money on him never completing the book if someone would take that bet. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to, and his fans often talk about how GRRM’s real ending is going to be so amazingly mind blowing blah blah that he’s probably better off never writing an ending and just having the fans assume it was going to be great when in reality he didn’t really have a good ending in sight and it’s hard to stick the ending to such a complex story.
I reckon fan-fiction wrote the best ending/overall plotline. Spoilered, well, in case people don’t want to read a twist or two.
Jon Snow is the rightful heir of Winterfell, being the first born and legal son of Ned Stark, who was married in secret before Catelyn. Thus all the Starks are bastards and only ones left who know this are Littlefinger and perhaps some outliers like Benjen or Howland Reed (who I reckon is the Boba Fett of the trilogy, everyone puts their fantasies onto him, but he’ll probably not appear). Catelyn sent Ned to his death knowingly. Thus with a completed bloodline of Targ and Stark being the ultimate threat to the power of all sides, this causes some issues. Also, Lady Stoneheart might have some objections there too. Flips a bunch of politics on its head. Jon Snow also having been dead might well be unlikely to father a child, another important political firework.
I think we can pretty much extrapolate most of the ending from the HBO ending and the things we know from the book that were cut from the TV show.
After all this time it’s hard for me to even remember what’s in the books and what was in the show, but yeah I assume some variation of “Daenerys shows up to help the North against the White Walkers but proves to be unfit for the Iron Throne. At some point, a door is held.” is the basic gist of it.
Yeah, but in my fantasy world made up from a book which will never be published it can be much more interesting than the crappy show of which 50% was from crap writers.
George’s latest update to his blog is really . . . something:
Yes, of course I am still working on THE WINDS OF WINTER. I have stated that a hundred times in a hundred venues, having to restate it endlessly is just wearisome. I made a lot of progress on WINDS in 2020, and less in 2021… but “less” is not “none.”
He then goes on to talk about the other dozen projects he’s working on besides Winds of Winter. You should really read the whole thing. He sounds like a cranky old man who’s completely done with this “books” bullshit and just wants to work on cool TV shows.
https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2022/03/09/random-updates-and-bits-o-news/
What I get from that is:
“I am also not writing Dunk and Egg stories either, despite the TV series being written at the moment”
and
“I am writing another massive history chunk of Westeros instead of ASOIAF because this is what I really want to do now. Apart from editing other peoples work in Wildcards.”
Oh no, dear god, I realise now that each Dunk and Egg Novella IS A FULL SEASON of the series. It’s going to make The Hobbit films look like the Abbreviated version of a story.
Bruno Heller, the creator and showrunner of ROME, is writing his pilot script for the Corlys Velaryon series. That one started out as NINE VOYAGES, but now we’re calling it THE SEA SNAKE, since we wanted to avoid having two shows with numbers in the title. The other one TEN THOUSAND SHIPS, the Nymeria series. Amanda Segel, our showrunner, has delivered a couple drafts of that one, and we are forging ahead. The third of the live action shows is the Dunk & Egg series, helmed by Steve Conrad. My team and I have had some great sessions with Steve and his team, and we really hit it off. He’s determined to do a faithful adaptation of the stories, which is exactly what I want; these characters and stories are very precious to me. The first season will be an adaptation of the first novella, “The Hedge Knight.” Contrary to what you may have read on line, the show will not be called DUNK & EGG, which could be mistaken for a sitcom by viewers unfamiliar with the stories. We’re leaning toward A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS for the series title, though THE HEDGE KNIGHT has its partisans as well.
Holy crap, those all sound awesome!
And tbf, I think a lot of people are fine with him taking some time to consult on House of the Dragon. That one is already a told story at least and should be pretty awesome with showrunners who don’t want to end it early for the next thing.
Yeah, but without that we’d have missed out on… Erm, Gemini Man? What the f**k The Three Body Problem is? Or The Chair?
I suspect they fell out of their window of opportunity.
Yeah, it bit them in the ass. And actually I’m a bit worried they are going to fuck up The Three Body Problem (it’s a Hugo Award winning book).
I still have hope for TTBP. It’s easy to forget that when they were going off someone else’s writing, GoT was excellent TV. It’s only when they had to write it themselves that they shit the bed.
I think the real problem was that the stuff they happened to cut out in the earlier seasons happened to be integral to the ending. Plus a lot of “let’s just get this done and GTFO”. They COULD write, the Hardhome episode was completely made up and probably the best in the show.
I think you have a point here. There was talent there, certainly on an epsode, those which kept it afloat, Hardholme, even being stupid, the likes of Beyond the wall (where they travel up to capture a random undead, Genry runs 30 miles in 30 second) is still a spectacle and entertaining. Those pinnacle episodes, Battle of the bastards, kept the series interesting. Maybe it’s an example of a lame series carried by a few talented directors in (usually) episode 9.
I think the problem with season 8 was it though 6 episode 9s was a good thing.
An undead they didn’t need!
The main problem with Season 8 was that it had to wrap up Season 7, which stunk.
You know how the last couple seasons were so bad they retroactively shit all over the great early seasons both in people’s memory and their desire to rewatch?
I bet George feels the same way. His story was shit on so badly that he too isn’t interested in returning to them.
I have no explanation for his reassurances that he’s still working on it, though, other than that I personally don’t believe him.
I’m curious if people would read it even if he did finish. So I created a poll.