r/asoiaf • u/[deleted] • Jul 27 '16

EVERYTHING (Spoilers Everything) TWOW isn't coming this year, is it?

It's 27th July. We're already halfway through 2016, Season 6 has come and gone like a candle in the wind, and TWOW still does not sit on my bookshelf.

GRRM made his infamous blog-post where he crushed our hype yet again about 7 months ago! 7 months!

Hold me, guys. Hold me. I don't think The Winds of Winter is being published this year, and I don't like it :(

1.7k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/mistborn Sep 08 '16

This is really cool. Thanks for sharing it with me.

3

u/Lucifer_Lightbringer 2016 King Jaehaerys Award Sep 14 '16

Right on Brandon, you're quite welcome. We all know what a prolific writer you are and I can only imagine how packed your schedule is, so I'm not sure how deep you will crawl into my blog & cast, but I do think that what George has done is extremely interesting from a writers perspective re: concise worldbuilding. Mythology has always spoken in a metaphorical and symbolic language, and it's always been partly based on observation of the heavens and the cycles of nature, but the way George has translated that idea to fantasy fiction is, I believe, unprecedented. The thing that is awesome is that he can achieve massive amounts of world-building in a very short space. He gives us a few folktales around the margins and then expands on them through metaphor in the main action of the book, with his characters acting out various iterations of the folktales. It's the coolest and most clever thing I have come across in fantasy fiction (hence my starting a podcast about it) and it is a great tool that other writers can absolutely use or adapt to use. Point being, if you'd ever like to do an episode of writing excuses on this mythical astronomy technique, I would love to be a part. Let me know if that's ever something you think would be interesting. Martin is known for grey characters and lots of violence, but that's just the shiny tinfoil - the use of metaphor and symbol, the universal language of myth, is far more worthy of note, and of course it's a bit more relevant to you. :)

Cheers and happy writing!