Remember when GRRM was so pissed that people criticized his friend Robert Jordan for faffing around for over a decade and never finishing the Wheel of Time series? Yeah, same.
Imagine you're writing an epic tale that gets converted into the world's most popular TV show, then flown into the side of a mountain by some shitty director. I'd imagine the hate mail and public ridicule he probably got would make anyone lose the drive to finish.
Be honest, do you think he's worked on them at all since the show started?
He may have done a chapter, maybe two since then? That's probably it, though.
He has no intention of finishing, especially now that the show is done and people are left with negativity surrounding the ending. It's the worst possible situation for him, because even if he wanted to finish the books there's just no way he can do it.
IMO, the best thing he can do is acknowledge this, and draw a line in it. Either hand it off to a protégé or writer friend that is happy to continue the story, or outright say that ASOIAF is done.
Martin gave a more nuanced answer in which he said he envied authors who self-publish their books and thus don't have to worry about deadlines
Like this bitch is worried about deadlines. Like deadlines mean a goddamned thing to him. I remember when Game of Thrones started airing wondering if he could finish the books before the show ended. This seemed like a possibility at the time? I don't even remember. All I know is there has been nothing for 13 years. 13 years. I get it, he's having more fun with other shit, but just hire someone to ghostwrite them with you. This is your main legacy, whether you want it to be or not.
at this point this is a HL3 situation and it's better if he never finishes the series. it will never live up to expectations. leave it be. if you enjoyed the story so far, celebrate that and move on. it's about the journey, not the destination.
Just make sure that Martin takes decent notes so that Sanderson can be tapped to bring the story home. Sanderson did a marvelous job finishing Robert Jordan's giant story.
This is probably not the place to discuss just how fragile IRL feudalism was to actual runs of bad winters and sub-par summers, which were notorious for causing famines that spread across nations. I can't speak about how it works in Westros, but volcanic winters and bad solar weather shifted the tides of history here on earth.
Considering the notion of decades long winters, the people of Westros would likely be forced to be migratory much like the Dothraki.
That all said, it still was a rich world, and I suspect Martin just wrote himself into a bunch of corners.
You can't say "I wish they were done" and on the other hand include in his will that the manuscripts be destroyed if he dies and can't be finished by anyone else.
D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I've never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that's going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn't manage to tie it all together, neither can he.
Lol, I'm not exactly a fan of the series (I only really liked the first two books) but this is ridiculous. At this point he is just trolling.
I'd say I'm happy I moved on. I haven't even bought A dance with dragons because I couldn't finish the one before that as I didn't really like it.
That being said, I'd like to get a conclusion to the story and I'm willing to go back to the series AFTER it's concluded (which most likely will never happen).
Is this community ok with confusing fantasy and science fiction? I thought it was a snob librarian's thing.
I know some stories mix both, but I don't think ASOIAF has anything to do with sf.
I see these posts every once in a while and it seems weird the topic of a book not being written still captures people's attention after so long and so much repeated discussion.
He should just finish it off writing it like a historical retelling the way Fire and Blood was done. POV chapters are nice but when he isn't going to release anything with that approach something is better than nothing so the last impression of the final arc isn't HBO's Game of Thrones.