Make sure to loudly insinuate that George Martin is going to die soon (because he is very fat).
The main problem I had with the RW was the feeling that it was all just too stupid. The Starks had absolutely no reason to expect honorable behavior from the Frey’s - they’ve hardly acted honorable themselves - they’ve experienced multiple instances of betrayal and treachery already - and yet they walk right into it with their eyes wide open. It’s not just Robb that is stupid - it’s him, his mother, and his entire entourage.
It’s power of the plot at its worst. Robb is depicted as a careful commander who surrounds himself with bodyguards, etc… right up until the story requires him to not do so. He argues that one should not place all the Stark eggs in one basket… and promptly puts every (known) living/free person who could command the loyalty of the North into the power of the Freys. He has an army to protect him, he argues … and then doesn’t actually use it to provide any protection. To me, this lessened the impact of the scene a lot.
Of course, “people do stupid things” seems to be a recurring theme in the book, but for me, the RW would have worked better if the Starks had actually taken reasonable precautions against treachery and simply been overwhelmed by the scale of the betrayal.
http://www.georgerrmartin.com/excerpt-from-the-winds-of-winter/
Again, surprised I’m beating Woolen Horde to the punch on this. Read the chapter and discuss, I don’t want to write my comments yet before people have a chance to read it on their own.
Well that was really something…
The twist at the end certainly got me, wasn’t expecting it. The way he wrote the end was pretty impressive. I think the word “rape” was used too many times in the chapter, though. When I sit down to write (not comparing myself to GRRM in any way), I find it uncomfortable to use it more than once, let alone 100 times!
I’m assuming that:
The dwarf is tyrion?
I assuming he’s just making fun of people who say there’s too much rape in his books.
What’s with the underlined passages?
They couldn’t italicize the internal monologue, I guess? Hope HTML 6 allows for italics!
He writes on Wordstar, which is a DOS word processor. But manuscript format is that he underlines what he wants italicized.
He riffs a bit more on his blog, but he originally wrote this like 10 years ago, back when he was going to do the 5-year leap ahead in the narrative. This was going to be the opening Arya chapter for Feast for Crows. But then he scrapped the 5-year leap, and this chapter got pushed back to Dance with Dragons, where it was going to be Arya’s closing chapter, but Dance got too big, and they felt it worked better as an opening chapter, so now it’s Winds of Winter!
No, but he plays him on stage.
Read it and weep. Or not, depending on whether or not you’re a glass half-full or half-empty sort of person.
“I’m still in the middle of the book, so it’ll be some time before I write the scenes in which they die.”
Oh, you don’t say?
He’s still in the middle. And it’s been how many years already he’s been working on this?
As someone who started reading the books when book 2 came out, and witnessed the increasing delivery time for each book, along with the (arguable) decrease in quality, I’m very much in the “when it’s done” camp. It seems strange to start having expectations now given the past release schedule, especially after book 6 was really part of book 5, and then he split the books, so he’d book 6 done in no time. It’s quite possible GRRM has lost the plot, and is searching for ways to get the characters to the endpoints he’d envisioned many many years ago, while not turning his book into a Dean Koontz special.
I thought book 5 was actually part of book 4, and still it took years to come out.
Pretty soon readers of the books and watchers of the TV show will not have to worry about SPOILERS. In fact viewers of the TV show may have to be careful about not SPOILING it for the readers, as the show is going past the books this next season and will pass all the books by the end of next season probably.
You are probably right. It all blends together.
We’ll have no idea though how much the show producers are deviating from what they were told by GRRM, and even if GRRM is going to change his mind about the story as he puts pen to paper writing books 6 and 7.
Which is sort of a weird and interesting thing all on it’s own.
I think I quit reading after book three and now I’ll just enjoy the show. If he ever actually finishes the books I’ll read the rest.
I abandoned Martin for the same reason I gave up on Jordan. A promising start and characters I cared about were buried in a morass of side plots and throwaway scenes designed to stretch the series out for commercial reasons. I’ll read them all when they’re done and when I can get them at much reduced cost, but for now I refuse to reward this kind of behavior with more purchases. I fully expect the Martin estate to have to hire someone like Sanderson to finish the mess Ice and Fire has become sometime in the next decade or so.
How do you know he was stretching the series out for commercial reasons?