In defense of George. R.R Martin.

Yup, you read that right.

In case you don’t know, Geroge R.R Martin is the author of the amazing book series, A song of Fire and Ice. Or as a lot of people know the TV show as, A Game of Thrones.

I’m a pretty big fan, I’ll prob have another few posts about it soon. I did come in pretty late, I hadn’t heard about it at all until the show started making it big a few years ago. I’m currently re-reading A Storm of Swords.It’s taking me a quite a bit, as it’s such a long book, but I chip away at least a couple of chapters a night. Also watching season three again (I miss the Hound!)

There’s one thing I’ve noticed recently and that’s a lot of people are bashing Mr. Martin for the speed he writes, writing messages on his fb and his website, commenting how he should stop everything else he does and sits down to write. About how awful and lazy of him that he let the show overtake him.

Here’s my two cents. Note, if you disagree and want to politely debate, I welcome your comments. If you scream at me and call me stupid whore, then I’m going to delete your comments. Pretty simple.

I think people need to leave George R.R Martin alone.

First, I get you.You want Winds of Winter. Trust me, I do as well. I’m dying for when it comes out to hunker down for a week and find out what happens. Especially after season six. Since each season of GoTs gets further away from the original material, Kinda makes me wonder how much is made up and how much is from GRRM. So yes, I want the book as much as you do.

However,

With the size of those books, it’s not reasonable to expect him to pop one out every year or two.The first one, A Game of Thrones, which is the shortest in the series, is around 835 pages, so I’m assuming is probably around 25o,000 words.  The last one, A dance with dragons, is 1040 pages. Which I’m going to assume is around 325,000 words.

That’s a whole lot of words and will take a massive time to write and edit.

To put into perspective, I started writing my own books in October of 2014. From then until now (July of 2016) I’ve written 3 complete (One at 70,000 W. A 2nd at 95,000 W and a 3rd at 85,000 W. I also have a fourth WIP at 26,000 at the moments.) If I add all those numbers up, it equals 276,000. Which is close to the length of the first one.

That’s almost two years of writing. And we’re not even talking about the time it takes to edit and rewrite scenes and have someone else read it. Not to mention the time it takes for a publishing house to get it all ready for publication and get it out to the world.

Also, we have to take into fact that GRRM does more then just write this book. The man has a life! He’s a producer on the show, he writes other stuff, like the Egg and Dunk prequels. In late 2014 he came out a massive book, a History of the world of Ice and Fire. He’s also said he doesn’t want to just write in this universe, he writes other books outside Westeros completely. Not to mention he has a wife and friends and such outside of writing.

So yes, it really would be nice if that man was a robot who could write these massive books at a speed of one per year. But it’s not going to happen. He’s doing the best he can.

It annoys me because everywhere I turn, I see people bashing him for the speed he writes.

Take a deep breath and relax. We’re all just going to have to wait.

Until then, lets re-read the books and watch the shows until we can’t take it anymore

~Ames