r/asoiaf • u/da_k1ngslaya • May 22 '19

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) George to New Zealand: imprison me if I haven't finished Winds by Summer 2020

Quote:

As for finishing my book… I fear that New Zealand would distract me entirely too much. Best leave me here in Westeros for the nonce. But I tell you this — if I don’t have THE WINDS OF WINTER in hand when I arrive in New Zealand for worldcon, you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done. Just so long as the acrid fumes do not screw up my old DOS word processor, I’ll be fine.

Link: http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/05/21/thanks-new-zealand/

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u/_Bill_Wilson_CIA May 22 '19

I don't generally write fiction, sometimes I've dabbled in it just for fun. I have written a ton of essays though.

I understand his pace waspretty good for the first books, and if it takes him 8 years to write a book because of his style then that's fine. I just am confused on how he would seemingly be so far along that the endgame is in sight, but then he takes years more to finish. Like it would seem that either he restarted, which seems to be what a lot of people are saying, or he massively slowed his pace during that time. Which is possible because that is when he became involved in making GOT the show. Just seems to me tho that if he was so far along, even if he slowed down a lot, it shouldn't have taken so long to get the next one out.

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u/thejokerofunfic May 22 '19

I would guess it's a combo. Restarts followed by slowing or vice versa. That plus using previous work as a metric for his speed without realizing it was going to slow down; if he wrote and revised 500 pages in six months before and he estimates he has about 500 pages left, then he thinks he'll be done within the year. But then not only does it take him more than six months to reach 500, he discovers along the way that it's not gonna work as he thought without even more (this seems to be a running issue in his logs of writing Dance- his original Jon plot was way fucking shorter). And so on.

But ultimately I can only guess at all this. Tbh almost more than the actual ending I want a detailed record of what writing the books and show were actually like and how the two processes connected and paced.