A Game of Thrones - TV Show Discussion Thread

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Yep. Plot armor.

[rah]

He might out live the older one here, but not the younger ones.

[Bosh]

If you go and dig up some of his old speeches from his website you can see even way back 30 years ago that he got way into fandom stuff and attended a huge amount of cons, read stacks of fanzines, etc. I`m sure he`s spent hundreds of hours lurking on fan forums ovrr the years. He was also always a slow writer. During his first career before Armageddon Rag killed it he wrote way less words per year than these days, it just looked like more since it was mostly short stories. He seems to like being a writer more than actually writing **** and but he does have talent an does spend a lot of time revising stuff.

[Guynemer]

Writing stuff isn't ****ing easy. I live with a writer. That **** is hard. Everyone needs to chill their ****ing ****.

[DaShi]

Writers need to do what they are told. Once you commit to being a writer, you are a slave to your audience. The most absurd part is when writers expect to be compensated for their writing. They are just sitting down and pushing buttons. They deserve as much pay as Homer Simpson.

[Lorizael]

Homer is actually a step above writers, because he figured out how to automate button pushing.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Writing stuff isn't ****ing easy. I live with a writer. That **** is hard. Everyone needs to chill their ****ing ****.

In addition, the world GRRM has created is REALLY complex and I'm not just talking about the past history (pre-GOT) stuff. He's gotta make sure he doesn't completely **** something up that he wrote about 3 books ago and that requires a whole lot of checking. This is maybe where the reading of the fanzines hurts him - he knows the fans are going to go back and ding him on continuity errors where another writer may be like, **** it.

[Dinner]

Yeah, I imagine it is hard to keep track of all those characters then make sure what you wrote is consiste t with what he previously wrote 20 years ago, etc...

[Hauldren Collider]

I'd just go ahead and have continuity errors then laugh at the fan sadness all the way to the bank

[regexcellent]

The infamous Jeyne Westerling's hips case was an incident in which he forgot previous details.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

In addition, the world GRRM has created is REALLY complex and I'm not just talking about the past history (pre-GOT) stuff. He's gotta make sure he doesn't completely **** something up that he wrote about 3 books ago and that requires a whole lot of checking. This is maybe where the reading of the fanzines hurts him - he knows the fans are going to go back and ding him on continuity errors where another writer may be like, **** it.

Why cater for the obsessively anal-retentives?

[pchang]

Maybe it's the anal retentives that really drive sales.

[regexcellent]

Daenerys, famously, is not anal retentive.

[Bosh]

I'd just go ahead and have continuity errors then laugh at the fan sadness all the way to the bank

I think he's already hit the "has more money than he'll ever spend" level at this point. He really is a perfectionist about that sort of thing.

Don't really care that much how slow he is one way or the other, I think he's a good enough writer than I'd enjoy a big stack of his first drafts but I'm sure we'll get some interesting stuff this way as well. But people shouldn't be surprised at him being slow, he was incredibly slow back in the 70's.

One thing that stuff like Martin's side projects shows is that he really hasn't lost interest in Westeros as pretty much all of the side stuff he's written in the last decade+ has been set in Westeros, as much as I'd like one last story set in his Thousand Worlds sci-fi setting or more Haviland Tuf for that matter.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Why cater for the obsessively anal-retentives?

What Bosh said.

He himself is probably an obsessive anal-retentive. It's why the world he's created is such an incredible thing - it's very, very detailed (his recently released "The Worlds of Ice and Fire" - mostly written by the folks at A Song of Ice and Fire website based on stuff he's written in the books with input from GRRM).

In addition, pchang probably has the right of it as well, the original boost of popularity that got it noticed by HBO in the first place was likely those that really enjoyed the anal retentive lists of heraldry and history (the stuff that really appeals to me, for instance).