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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 9433059" data-attributes="member: 58197">&lt;Off-topic rant incoming.&gt;I used to have a lot of sympathy for GRRM.&quot;Song of Ice and Fire&quot; currently stands at 1.7 million words. Outside of epic fantasy with its tolerance for giant doorstoppers, a typical novel runs about 100,000 -- ASoIaF is already the length of 17 normal-sized novels! And the dude has been working on it since the early 1990s (&quot;A Game of Thrones&quot; was published in 1996, and he was surely working on it for at least a couple years before that). It's been thirty years! If I were in his shoes, I would be so incredibly burned out on that story.However, I have now heard a lot of people talk about how they never start a series until they know it's been finished. Which of course is a great way to ensure that it never gets finished -- if the first book flops, the publisher isn't going to plug gamely ahead, they'll drop it and so much for that. At the same time, I can hardly blame the folks taking this attitude, after getting burned by stuff like ASoIaF. On top of that, GRRM keeps milking the popularity of the setting with things like House of the Dragon, and if he's going to do that, I don't think it's unfair to demand that the original story that put Westeros on the map gets finished!He doesn't have to do it all himself. That's clearly not going to happen anyway -- just look at an actuarial table. But if he isn't going to, he should take on an apprentice (or two, or three) and prepare them to take the story to a conclusion, the way Robert Jordan did when he realized he wouldn't live to finish the Wheel of Time.(Or he could just convince Stephen King to do it, and it'd be knocked out in a couple of months.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 9433059, member: 58197"] [I]<Off-topic rant incoming.>[/I] I [I]used[/I] to have a lot of sympathy for GRRM. "Song of Ice and Fire" currently stands at 1.7 million words. Outside of epic fantasy with its tolerance for giant doorstoppers, a typical novel runs about 100,000 -- ASoIaF is already the length of 17 normal-sized novels! And the dude has been working on it since the early 1990s ("A Game of Thrones" was published in 1996, and he was surely working on it for at least a couple years before that). It's been thirty years! If I were in his shoes, I would be so incredibly burned out on that story. However, I have now heard a lot of people talk about how they never start a series until they know it's been finished. Which of course is a great way to ensure that it never [I]gets[/I] finished -- if the first book flops, the publisher isn't going to plug gamely ahead, they'll drop it and so much for that. At the same time, I can hardly blame the folks taking this attitude, after getting burned by stuff like ASoIaF. On top of that, GRRM keeps milking the popularity of the setting with things like House of the Dragon, and if he's going to do that, I don't think it's unfair to demand that the original story that put Westeros on the map gets finished! He doesn't have to do it all himself. That's clearly not going to happen anyway -- just look at an actuarial table. But if he isn't going to, he should take on an apprentice (or two, or three) and prepare them to take the story to a conclusion, the way Robert Jordan did when he realized he wouldn't live to finish the Wheel of Time. (Or he could just convince Stephen King to do it, and it'd be knocked out in a couple of months.) [/QUOTE]

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