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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remus Lupin" data-source="post: 5167752" data-attributes="member: 12760">Where I think it's presumptuous is assuming that somehow or another Martin is "shirking" some responsibility he has to you, personally, or to his fandom collectively to finish "your" book.As I said at the outset, I get impatient too. I had "A Dance with Dragons" on my Amazon.com preorder queue for, like, two years before I realized that I might as well just wait for him to finish the book before I went and ordered it). And, to be frank, I'm not really wild about "Wild Cards."I've been working on a book in my own field (not Science Fiction or Fantasy, alas!) for about seven years in one way, shape, or form or another. Sometimes, the work on the project is going well. At other times, it slows to a halt. Right now, it's halted. That doesn't mean I'm not working; it just means I'm working on other projects, which are also important.At the same time, I'm doing background processing on the stalled book. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about conceptual, theoretical, or practical problems that are getting in the way of finishing it. But, for the sake of my sanity as much as for the sake of my other projects, I have to put it aside for now. Once I get back to it, I hope that I'll be ready to crank it out in a relatively short period of time.In some regards, what separates a successful writer from an unsuccessful one is the ability to actually finish a project (whether you can get it published, and whether it's any good, are also of course important, but can't be judged if you never finish). I can't keep track of the number of failed doctoral dissertations that fell by the wayside simply because the author coulnd't finish.As for Martin, he does have a very concrete obligation -- to his publisher. And since I suspect he got a nice fat advance on this book, I have now doubt that he's in regular conversation with his editor about when he's going to finish the damn thing. We can only hope that the pressure is increasing daily, and that it will have the desired effect.</blockquote>

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