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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1193196" data-attributes="member: 5171">Hey, Eosin,Hey, personal attacks, great.  He asked me if I thought my opinion counted for more than his because I have pro credits and he doesn't actually write at all, as far as he's stated.  I said yes.  This is not unlike arguing a point about architecture with an architect and then taking offense when the architect then says, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do think I am more qualified to have an opinion than you are."  I could still be wrong, but, well, in this particular field (that is, the process of fiction-writing), I appear to have more experience than he does, so the odds are in my favor.  I have no idea what you do for a living, but if I came up to you and said, "Hey, I know I have no idea what this is all about, but..." and then said a common and faintly patronizing misconception about your field of work, what would you do?  I'm not angry at Umbran.  If Umbran wants to disagree with me, go him.But when I post a disclaimer saying "I am by no means terribly important -- but I do have some pro sales and SFWA membership, and here's what I think", and you take that as your opening to make a personal attack, I don't really see what that gets you.  If I'm bursting your bubbles by trying to state an opinion from a semi-professional standpoint, I'm terribly sorry.Submitting your work to professional markets is slightly different than being accepted and published in them.  Submitting articles is slightly different than submitting fiction (I have a whopping one pro-level article publication).  But good luck nevertheless.  Anybody willing to play rejection-letter roulette is good people in my book.As for your not-attacking-me point, I agree completely.  As long as your stories rock and you rake in the ducats, you can do whatever you want.  That said, I think that GRRM runs the risk of losing the ducat-raking potential if he stretches this out much longer.Fusangite:a) All writers write the same: I don't think that.  My writing buddies write a lot differently than I write.  However, I do think that all, or at least most, successful writers treat writing as a craft, as well as an art, even if they don't think of it in those terms.  They're aiming for beauty and perfection, sure, but they're also aiming to crank out a good first draft that follows the plot that they outlined and which they can then polish and tweak until it works and gets across all that beauty they wanted to achieve.  Or that doesn't follow any plot outline, but which they can then tweak as needed to make work.  Or something along those lines.  Barring Heinlein literalists, almost everyone agrees that it's good to get a rough draft down, then revise and edit and tune until it's perfect.  Just about every writer does that (at least until they're so huge and rich that they don't have to do so, at which point their writing usually begins to get bloated and bad).b) Writer's Block is completely and utterly real.  No problem there.  On the other hand, if I were GRRM and had his resources as well as, what, two years?  Three years?  To get the next one cranked out, I'd probably have figured out a way around it by now.  There are methods.  There are ways.  They range from cute writing exercises to writing individual scenes (which is what it sounds like he's trying to do) to going to the spa and getting an herbal treatment to exorcise your stress.  If you have money and time, you can get through writer's block.  Up to a certain point, I am extremely sympathetic to people with writer's block.  Past that point, it begins to feel like a cop-out.  If you're not interested in the world anymore, or if you've written yourself into a corner, go write about something else.  I believe that Eddings started writing his Diamond Throne series while still working on the Mallorean, alternating the books.  The world didn't seem to end.  If GRRM needs to write something else for awhile, he should do so.  He shouldn't just sit around complaining about his writer's block after three years, though.  And he isn't, I should note.  He's not making a plea for sympathy.  I'm not commenting on him.  I'm commenting on the people leaping to his defense with claims that he's got writer's block and that I should treat this as a congenital illness over which he has no control and for which he is in no way responsible.c) I've written novels.  I've written many novels.  Many of them I wrote when I was young and had no talent, and so they will never come out of the drawer.  On the other hand, in terms of novels that actually count and, you know, have a chance at being published, I've got one at Daw, one waiting for a final revision as soon as I get enough input from my writing buddies, and one that I should be working on right now.  I didn't bring them up because my earlier point was that I had had stuff published, and bringing up my unpublished novels in that context would have been somewhat disingenuous.  On the other hand, since the question here is not whether I have published but whether I have written, I can safely say that I understand how the process of writing, receiving critiques on, rewriting, receiving more critiques on, revising (which in my purely arbitrary distinction is more of a fine-tuning process than rewriting), receiving yet more critiques on, and finally line-editing the last polished copy of the novel works.  The first (non-sucky) novel took me a year to get through that process, but it's short -- probably about half of a GRRM novel in length.  The second is longer and has taken me about two years.  The third, I started yesterday.  We'll see how it goes.  The process is hard.  The process is not glorious.  The process is not nearly as much fun as receiving massive paychecks and flying all your friends to Switzerland for the weekend to go skiing.  But many people do it while working full-time jobs.Above and beyond my selfish desire to, you know, read the next book, I'm worried that GRRM has had this massive fanbase for too long -- that he's gotten halfway out there on the tightrope and then looked down and seen how far he could fall if things go wrong.  I have no evidence of that, mind you.  I have nothing at all to back that up.  Maybe he's just been spending the money we all gave him.  Maybe he's been working on other stuff under a different name.  Who knows?</blockquote>

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