Periodically someone will ask me if I've read any of the Song of Ice and Fire books. My answer is always no.<p>Then I launch into a rant about the Wheel of Time series. I got sucked into that series on book one and chewed through it all the way to book 7. At book seven I had caught up to the author and the fact that he hadn't written the next book in the series yet gave me an opportunity to take stock. I realized that the books had been getting less satisfying and more work to read than before. I also realized that Robert Jordan didn't know how to finish the series. He hadn't met a plot line he didn't like. I was sure he would die before Wheel of Time was finished. Right then and there I decided I was done and would no longer give my money to the series or any other series that showed signs of the same problem.
I totally called the Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan died and they had to bring in Brian Sanderson to finish. Brian definitely knows how to finish. But for me the magic had already gone.<p>It's not out of a sense of entititlement. I just don't enjoy unfinished stories. It bugs the crap out of me. George R. R. Martin strikes me as an author with different symptoms but a similar problem. I'm not sure he knows how to finish it. I won't spend my money until he proves it.
It's disappointing to me that this needs to be said. I read the first <i>Song of Ice and Fire</i> book in the middle of 2013, and I finished the fifth book this past March. That's several thousand pages of fiction in less than a year. Clearly, I like the books.<p>But I can wait for the sixth book. I did fine in 2012 without <i>ASOIAF</i>, and I'll do fine in 2015 and 2016 and even 2017 if it comes to that.<p>Last year I discovered I prefer novels and assorted nonfiction to reading random articles on the Internet. I prefer to chew on one idea for a long time than a thousand little ideas at once.<p>So what I'd really like is a way to find other books to read that I enjoy as much a Martin's work. I've signed up for GoodReads, but nothing has come of it just yet.<p>Does anyone have any suggestions other than browsing Amazon or strolling through a Barnes and Noble?
Creative writing is, much like software development, one of those jobs where you need to enter a different kind of mental state to be really productive. And that state cannot be maintained indefinitely.<p>George R.R. Martin writes big, fat books that are highly multithreaded, as part of a series that is already complex enough that it makes real life seem simple. If it were a software project, there would already be four or five more developers working on it. But he's trying to punch it out solo.<p>I don't expect him to finish, really. He's probably burned out for the second or third time, at least, and is getting too much fan pressure resulting from the television adaptation bump to focus on regenerating the artistic mojo.<p>If you ever read bestselling authors, they're always thanking their support people in the dedication or foreword or colophon or wherever. Most of them only need a few part-time or shared employees, like their editor, agent, and publicist. Martin probably needs at least one full-time assistant just for indexing and continuity.<p>This is why I like books that say "third book of the Whatever Trilogy" and the other two are right there on the shelf next to it. It lets me know that the author can finish something, and I don't have to wait for it to happen.<p>I did read the first few books in Martin's series, but I borrowed those copies. I don't really want to get sucked in and be left hanging like those people who got into Wheel of Time. With something like this, you never really know if the bus that just pulled away was the last one on the route for the night. So if you sit on that bench, the next one may never come.
Expectation is a fascinating thing.<p>Gaiman is essentially describing the dichotomy in expectation between products and consultancy.<p>This is particularly complicated in fandom, because creators often say (and legitimately mean) that a body of work exists <i>because of</i> (the encouragement of) their fans. That's true, but it doesn't mean that what they're creating isn't a product first, and not bespoke work on the authority of and responsible to fans.<p>Apple has fans too, but took basically no heed of complaints that the Mac Pro hadn't been updated in years.
I enjoy the musings of the contract between writer and reader. If the author doesn't agree, on some level, to finish the series and it's the reader's requirement that a whole series must be read, then the reader is left with no choice but to wait until a series is finished before beginning. In various degrees of depth, we enter into obligations to others by beginning something, whether writing a book, having a child, ordering food etc. Seems the blog author's opinion is that GRRM has no obligation to his readers. I'd argue he has some form of professional obligation, but certainly no contractual ones w/ recourse.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the article I feel there is a flip side to this: announcing what you're going to do can be a way to put some pressure on a late project. Be it a business project (signaling we're in crunch because we've half announced it), or a personal (as in a way to fight procrastination).<p>Now I don't know how much GRRM tells about his progress on his blog, because I don't follow it, but I'm sure some authors in the past have used this technique to feel some pressure to finish up something.
I think part of this is the contract that exists would be between Martin and the publisher. They're the ones that would need to get the finished product from GRRM.<p>But what about kickstarter projects? If I'm now the one funding or partially funding does the artist then, in Neil Gaiman's words, "become my bitch"?<p>What the difference in expectations when you're a consumer of a product (GRRM to me) or a funder of a product (kickstarter to me)?
Authors have been missing deadlines pretty much as long as they've been writing books. If you wish to have an expectation that author X or book Y isn't going to fit that pattern then feel free, but I'm not sure you should be terribly surprised or outraged if / when it doesn't happen.<p>The simple solution would seem to be that if you are someone who likes reading things in a nice predictable pattern the wait for the series to complete before starting. After all, it's not as if there are a lack of things to read in the meantime.
Ironic, the entitlement he feels about having an adapter on his AA flight before complaining about entitlement issues from his/GRRM's audience... or was that the point?
If he made it an app instead people would be up in arms the updates don't come fast enough too.
But with books at least they would pay him again if he released a new one.
Site's dead. Can someone summarize better than the title?<p>(edited an hour later, nobody's posted a cache link and nobody's summarized the actual post... so all I got is along the lines of "somebody's expectations collided with reality" and a bunch of off topic yet interesting literary discussion. And it seems to have something to do with the multiple laptop power standards that I already know about for aircraft and their airlines)
I can only say that I was very glad that Robert Jordan had time to plan out and pass on the whole of his story to another writer.<p>I know it's entitled - but I really expect GRRM to make considerations to ensure that the whole story will be told. I don't think he owes me the story <i>now</i>, I don't mind waiting for him to do the writing as he envisions it - but I do kind of feel that he owes me a complete tale.
GRRM is not my bitch. Point taken, for sure.<p>However, I hope GRRM realizes that the opposite is also true. His readers aren't his bitch either. Without new quality material, interest in his books will fade. Also, HBO isn't his bitch either. If he doesn't produce new material, the TV show plot will pass the book's and he will lose some control over what people consider <i>the</i> real tale.
While I agree with the comments with respect to GRRM, I can't let Patrick Rothfuss off the hook.<p>I started reading the Kingkiller Chronicle with the understanding that he had already finished the books, and would be releasing them each year for three years. Now that he's blown each deadline by a couple years, I'm a lil' salty.<p>Was I incorrect to infer some light social contract there?
And there's a song about this: <a href="http://scifisongs.blogspot.com/2009/08/sci-fi-song-20-george-rr-martin-is-not.html" rel="nofollow">http://scifisongs.blogspot.com/2009/08/sci-fi-song-20-george...</a>.
"Sometimes it happens like that. You don't choose what will work. You simply do the best you can each time. And you try to do what you can to increase the likelihood that good art will be created."<p>Great advice.
If I promise to produce a piece of work in a time frame and then didn't produce that work in that time frame then I would expect to take some shit.
Very bad intro for the main article, because apparently Gaiman doesn't realise that American Airlines is 'not his bitch' either, and similarly he has no right to be <i>outraged</i> that his laptop didn't plug into their power adaptors.<p>I'm actually a bit sad that Gaiman went with "is not letting you down" rather than "is letting you down, but seriously, it's not that big a deal". If you build an audience with an expectation, and you don't see it through, you've let them down. That doesn't give the audience the right to do anything nasty to you, but you have disappointed them.<p>If you, as a writer, have stated an intention to make a series of X length, but any of the Life things that Gaiman mentions happen and you fail to complete it, that's fair enough. Life happens. But you've failed to see through on your commitment - that's a disappointment to people that wanted to see it through. It's not the end of the world - those people don't lose their jobs or their cats or whatever - but it's still a let-down.<p>The final moral of the story really should have been "So what, move on, Life happens", rather than implying that the questioner is a bad person for expecting someone to see through on something that they said they'd do.