Slow Dance

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I meant to but forgot to include this in my last post, so here's an exciting bonus all its own! Whee! The website Winter Is Coming was part of a roundtable discussion with George R. R. Martin at a big television conference over the weekend where the HBO adaptation was naturally the main topic of conversation, but thankfully they got a little bit outta GRRM about what's happening with the rest of the books yet to come. (via Sean)

Martin was also asked about whether he feels any pressure to finish the books soon, so the HBO series does not catch up with him. “I feel definite pressure to get these things done. I don’t want the series catching up with me.”

You know, it’s no secret that this last book [A Dance with Dragons] has taken much, much longer than I thought it would and much, much longer than anyone wanted it to. My editors and publishers are not happy with that, there’s an element of my fans that are vociferously angry about that, and most of all, I’m unhappy about it. But my goal has always been to make it the story I want to tell and to make it as good as I can.”

He then talked about how he had to change his approach on writing Dance due to the mounting pressure. “At a certain point, when the stress really got to me, I said ‘I gotta stop thinking about how long it takes me to write a book and just write one page at a time, one sentence at a time, one word at a time.’ That’s all I can do. I can’t say, ‘Oh God, I got 40 chapters left to do. How am I ever gonna do it?’ I just gotta write this chapter, this scene. Get it down on paper and stop worrying about that.”

During this discussion, he reiterated his opinion that they will need to split A Storm of Swords into two seasons. “And then they hit Storm of Swords, which is a monstrous long book. It’s 500 pages longer in manuscript than Clash of Kings, which is itself 100 pages longer than Game of Thrones. So when they hit Storm of Swords, they’re gonna have to, I think, make two seasons out of it.”

Adding it all up, Martin concluded, “I have like, a five, six year headstart here, so hopefully I can take advantage of that.”

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