It probably does. But if he's proud of his work and mindful of his reputation, this must bother him at some level. Surely.... Does he want to go down in history as that writer guy who never bothered to finish his major opus? At what point will his fans turn away from him? I was a potential fan, and I already have. Strange situation, for sure. Yet more speculation: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2017/07/11/fans-believe-george-rr-martin-has-secretly-finished-game-thrones/
I remember an interview with Lee Child where the interviewer asked him how he felt about Teeny tom casting himself as big jack, and child said in essence (I can't remember exactly) " I thought about my artistic integrity and what my fans would say, then I looked at the number of zeroes on the cheque and said yes. To my critics I say, can any of you tell me honestly you'd turn down the cash ?"
Yeah, they made him tell them everything. Nobody invests half a billion dollars on a wing and a prayer. He was pissed when they diverted from the books and they basically told him, "Fuck you, George, did you read your contract?" I'm not sure what he expected.
Yeah, I'd read something about this a while back, but didn't want to quote it because I can't remember where I got it from. The thing is, the filmed series is so popular that even if he does go ahead and write it differently now, HE's the one who is likely to piss off the fans for 'changing' the story. He's really allowed himself to get caught between a rock and a hard place. If he never finishes the series people will lose respect for him. If he goes ahead and finishes the book series differently from the TV series, he'll annoy lots of people. (And might even violate his contract? Dunno about that.) And if he just writes what the TV series has already done ...well, what's the point?
Oh, I'm sure there's some ego and butthurt involved. And again, I'm not sure what else he expected. This happens between authors and filmmakers all the time. Once you option your work you may as well have never had anything to do with it in the first place. Take the money, George... nobody cares about your artistic integrity.
If they want to give me 15 million dollars a year I don't care if they completely rewrite my book to feature dancing purple wombats....
There is no Game of Thrones series. It's the opposite, I think. He literally wrote three versions of Quentyn's arrival in Meereen to see which one made the most sense chronologically. That doesn't seem like the mark of someone losing interest, but someone overly obsessed with perfection. Every time Benioff and Weiss have innovated, they've come up embarrassingly short of Martin's work. I don't anticipate that changing.
Yes, I've heard that about Martin as well. That he's a perfectionist. I think I can believe that. He just doesn't seem to me to be somebody who would sell his soul for money. Just a judgement based on his attitude in interviews, etc. I think he's out of his depth now, and probably feeling a bit miserable about it, as I said in my original post on the subject. I do feel sorry for him. Because it must pain a perfectionist to watch somebody else 'doing' his story and leaving him behind. If he is losing interest (as opposed to suffering some kind of writer's block) it might be because of the filmed series. I dunno. He was already a bestselling author with a very comfortable income and reputation when the series was first mooted. I wonder if he simply succumbed to the lure of seeing his work onscreen? I mean, haven't we all loved the idea of watching our story turn into a movie? I wonder, if he had it to do all over again, if he'd still agree to the filmed series on the same terms?
Well, he does, apparently, have some creative control. Isn't he the 'executive producer?' However, that's not the same as writing the books. I don't know. It would depend. If I was well-off beforehand, I might knock them back. Either that, or make them wait till I was done with the books. I don't know. Does anybody really need 15 million if they're already a bestselling author?
I could get along very well with 1% of that tbh , but theres a difference between not needing and turning down ... I don't need a ferrari but if someone decided to give me one i wouldnt say no
Huh, looking back at the timeline Dragons was released on July 12, 2011. Season one of the show dropped on April 17, 2011 (when Dragons would have already been in the can). That means he hasn't released anything since the show first aired. That does not augur well. ETA: he actually released the book 7 days before the first season ended, which would have been the air date of the penultimate episode (when Ned lost his head)... I'm sure that was no accident.
I actually prefer it this way. People tend to watch bad adaptations because (A) even the water-downed skeleton of the original story is better than most TV/movies and (B) fans go gaga when they see their favorite characters on the screen, even if it is badly done. Just look at Harry Potter - seven godawful movies (not counting Azkaban) made millions with no real criticism. I'm hoping that when the final two books of ASoIaF are released, people who have already finished the show will realize how much they were cheated out of. "Across the sea, there is a person who hates the great lords of Westeros just as much as we do. Someone with a large army, three large dragons, and no husband. I'm going to build that fleet, and I'm going gallivant right over and give it to Daenerys Targaryen, along with my big cock!" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Crow's Eye, you call me. Well, who has a keener eye than the crow? After every battle the crows come in their hundreds and their thousands to feast upon the fallen. A crow can espy death from afar. And I say that all of Westeros is dying. Those who follow me will feast until the end of their days. We are the ironborn, and once we were conquerors. Our writ ran everywhere the sound of the waves was heard. My brother would have you be content with the cold and dismal north, my niece with even less... but I shall give you Lannisport. Highgarden. The Arbor. Oldtown. The riverlands and the Reach, the kingswood and the rainwood, Dorne and the marches, the Mountains of the Moon and the Vale of Arryn, Tarth and the Stepstones. I say we take it all! I say, we take Westeros." Why? ASoIaF was already twice as old then as Game of Thrones is now.
Well, if he finishes the series, I will go back and resume reading (or start again.) What put me off after several books was not his writing style or ability to spin a tale, which I thought was excellent, but the sense that it was dragging on and on ...and when I looked ahead and realised there were still several books to come, never mind a couple he hadn't written yet, I just stopped reading. In a way, a neverendum kills jeopardy to some extent. Because you KNOW the series has a LONG way to go, you don't expect anything to be settled really, and you don't feel the immediacy of "I wonder if this is IT." You know it's not going to be ...there are still 5 more books to come. If you were reading the books as stand-alones, Martin certainly has the ability to ratchet up suspense to make you believe the end is just around the corner. However, knowing there are lots more books to come before there will be a resolution rather spoiled it for me. Knowing that nothing I was reading about was actually leading to an end game—despite the suspense—made my attention span waver. That, and getting invested in too many characters that got killed off. I also wavered when I realised, after a while, that every time he introduced a new character, I didn't want to bother with them any more ...because they'd probably be killed in the next book. I don't think killing off characters is a bad thing, don't get me wrong, but to my mind, Martin does too much of it. Okay, in real life people die. But in a story if everybody you think will be important to the story gets killed off, that can damper enthusiasm. Obviously it didn't damper enthusiasm for everybody, but it did for me. Killing off Eddard was a master-stroke, but some of the deaths that came later on just felt ...meh. I truly do wonder if the 'winner' of this game of thrones will simply be the one person who doesn't get killed off.
How ironic it would be, to be the author to pen the novelization of a film series based on the books you wrote. Kind of like Devo covering Head Like a Hole. But not really like that at all, I guess.
