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George R. R. Martin: A Feast For Crows

George R.R. Martin: A Feast For Crows

Hi all,

For those of you who are interested, this is what was written by Mr Martin on his official website about his progress on A Feast of Crows:

"I have been getting lots of email lately asking for an update on the progress of A FEAST FOR CROWS. Here it is. I aim to please.

I have been getting even more email asking if the latest publication date announced by one bookstore or another is correct. It isn't. I don't even care what date it is. I am still writing the book. Until it is done and delivered, all these announced pubdates are arrived at by throwing darts at a calendar.

As I have been saying for a year, the moment the book is done I will announce it here. The instant. The second. So if you visit this website, and this notice is still in place, it means I'm still writing. That remains as true in June as it was in January. Yes, I have been slow in updating this announcement, but believe me, I will not be slow to tell the world that my FEAST is headed for the table.

For whatever reason, this fourth book has given me much more trouble than any of the earlier volumes. As of today, I have finished forty-eight chapters, and have another eighteen partially written. Half a dozen of them are within a few whiskers of completion. The good news is that I have recently completed the final Jaime chapter for this volume. I'm very close on Arya and Sansa too, and fairly close on Tyrion. The not-so-good news is that all the other viewpoints remain incomplete, and one crucial one is barely half-done. The prologue is giving me fits as well, but as of last night I think I may have solved it.

The last printout I did for my editors (who are even more interested in my progress than my readers) came in at 1067 manuscript pages. That count includes includes only the finished chapters, not the partials. The final draft of A GAME OF THRONES was 1088 manuscript pages. A FEAST FOR CROWS will definitely be longer. Most likely it will be longer than A CLASH OF KINGS. As to whether it will eventually be as long as A STORM OF SWORDS... I hope not, but I have given up on making predictions.

The tale grew in the telling, J.R.R. Tolkien once said. Mine too. At a certain point, the best that you can do is follow your story where it leads you.

The vast majority of the email that I receive continues to be very supportive. I do not have the time to respond to all those letters, or to answer questions about why the seasons are the way they are, how the maesters make their chains, which of the Targaryen kings married their sisters, or where Myr is located in relation to Tyrosh (there will be a map of the Free Cities in FEAST that should take of that last one at least). If I did, my progress would be even slower than it is at present. I do read my emails, however, and I appreciate all the enthusiasm and kind words.

Of late, some of the words I have been getting have been less kind. I don't answer those either, though at times I am tempted. I will say, just to set some rumors straight, that I am not dead, I am not dying, I am not in ill health, I have not forgotten about my readers, and I am not lounging in my hot tub drinking chilled wine with hot babes in bikinis (though I'd like to be). I have been working on this bloody book almost every bloody day (okay, except for Sundays during football season and the two days of the NFL draft) for more years than I care to contemplate, writing, rewriting, revising, and writing again, trying to make FEAST a feast in truth.

As for those of you (only a handful, thankfully) who seem outraged that I continue to collect toy knights, read books by other people, travel, teach, speak, and make appearances (as evidenced by my website)... sorry, but I have a life beyond A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. You should get one too. I am sorry if the long delays on A FEAST FOR CROWS have made you lose interest in the series, but believe me, your frustrations cannot possibly hold a candle to my own. For one thing, the way the book biz works, I don't get paid until the novel is (a) delivered, and (b) published.

It is worth remembering that Jack Vance published the third volume of his wonderful Demon Prince series (THE PALACE OF LOVE) in 1967 and the fourth volume (THE FACE) in 1979. And need I mention how long J.R.R. Tolkien worked on THE LORD OF THE RINGS or THE SILMARILLION? Does anyone now wish that he had knocked them out faster?

In the end, the only thing anyone remembers about a book is how good it was. I won't tell you that A FEAST FOR CROWS is going to be great. That's not my call to make. But I will say that I am doing my damndest.

Hang in there. I'll try to make you glad you did."
 
, but I have a life beyond A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. You should get one too.
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I'm sure so many people really want to tell their fans this, and frankly, sometimes they need to hear it.
 
If he's really getting hate mail for not completing a book (as he hints at in the above message) those fans of his deserve to be shot. Anyone whose tried writing fiction will intimately know the struggle you go through to complete a piece of work - and, even then, you feel like revising it to death because it doesn't seem as good as you could make it.
 
After reading Mr Martin's words, I now want to read his books! He seems like a pretty OK kinda guy :) Actually, have been hankering for some good fantasy books. It has been so long since I read any and I used to read so much!
 
A Feast for Crows

Look, I post enough content on this site I hope I don't get tagged for promotion but I don't feel like typing the same thing over so basically at the recent con, Martin has announced this book is done with some changes. This has been confirmed by his significant other Paris, for more details check it out HERE.

An official announcement is forthcoming Monday.
 
Excellent news, I've been eagerly awaiting this novel for several years now :). Always been perfectly contented to wait if it means a higher quality production and I'm fairly confident Martin will pull though and hopefully match the anticipation.
 
The most incredible news I've heard all year - he has an other half and she's called Parris???? I was wondering who Parris was in his announcement page on his website...

Uhm, all I can say is, IT'S ABOUT BLOODY TIME! :D

ds
 
No, I haven't finished writing everything I wanted to include in A FEAST FOR CROWS. I have wrapped up a whole bunch of characters and storylines since the last update in January, but "a whole bunch" does not equate to "all."
And I was facing another problem as well: the sheer size of the book.

All of the books in this series have been big, mind you. A GAME OF THRONES weighed in at 1088 pages in manuscript, not counting the appendices. A CLASH OF KINGS was even longer at 1184 pages, not counting the appendices. And A STORM OF SWORDS measured a gargantuan 1521 pages in manuscript, not counting the (etc).

Any publisher will tell you that a book as big as A STORM OF SWORDS is a production nightmare, and STORM did indeed cause problems for many of my publishers around the world. In some languages it was divided into two, three, or even four volumes. Bantam published STORM in a single volume in the United States, but not without difficulty. Pretty much everyone agreed that it would be a really good thing if the fourth volume in the series came in somewhat shorter than STORM, so I set out with the idea of delivering a FEAST closer in length to A CLASH OF KINGS.

Alas for good intentions. In hindsight, I should have known better. The story makes its own demands, as Tolkien once said, and my story kept demanding to get bigger and more complicated.

I passed A CLASH OF KINGS last year, and still had plenty more to write. By January, I had more than 1300 pages, and still had storylines unfinished. About three weeks ago I hit 1527 pages of final draft, surpassing A STORM OF SWORDS... but I also had another hundred or so pages of roughs and incomplete chapters, as well as other chapters sketched out but entirely unwritten. That was when I realized that the light I'd seen at the end of the tunnel was actually the headlight of an onrushing locomotive.

And that's why my publishers and I, after much discussion and weighing of alternatives, have decided to split the narrative into two books (printing in microtype on onion skin paper and giving each reader a magnifying glass was not considered feasible, and I was reluctant to make the sort of deep cuts that would have been necessary to get the book down to a more publishable length, which I felt would have compromised the story).

The first plan was simply to lop the text in half. In that scenario, I would finish the last few chapters in as short a length (and time) as possible. That would have produced a story of maybe 1650 to 1700 pages in manuscript, which we would simply have broken into two chunks of roughly equal length and published as A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part One and A FEAST FOR CROWS, Part Two.

We decided not to do that. It was my feeling -- and I pushed hard for this, so if you don't like the solution, blame me, not my publishers -- that we were better off telling all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. Cutting the novel in half would have produced two half-novels; our approach will produce two novels taking place simultaneously, but set hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and involving different casts of characters (with some overlap).

The division has been done, and it think it works quite well. The upshot is, A FEAST FOR CROWS is now moving into production. It is still a long book, but not too long; about the same size as A GAME OF THRONES. The focus in FEAST will be on Westeros, King's Landing, the riverlands, Dorne, and the Iron Islands. More than that I won't say.

Meanwhile, all the characters and stories removed from FEAST are moving right into A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, which will focus on events in the east and north. All the chapters I have not yet finished and/or begun are moving into DANCE. I think this is very good, if truth be told, since it will give me the room to complete those arcs as I had originally intended, rather than trying to tie them up quickly in a chapter or two so I could deliver the massively late Big FEAST.

So there it is. I know some of you may be disappointed, especially when you buy A FEAST FOR CROWS and discover that your favorite character does not appear, but given the realities I think this was the best solution... and the more I look at it, the more convinced I am that these two parallel novels, when taken together, will actually tell the story better than one big book.

And if there are those who don't agree, and still want their Big FEAST with all the trimmings set out on one huge table... well, there's an easy fix. Get both books, razor the pages out with an Exacto knife, interleave the chapters as you think best, and bring the towering stack of text that results to your favorite bookbinder... and presto, chango the Big FEAST will live again.

As for me, I am getting back to work. There's good news on that front too -- A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is half-done!!!

(And before anyone asks, yes indeed, this development means that Parris was right all along. It will now probably require seven books to complete the story).

—George R.R. Martin, May 29, 2005
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Not quite what we were all expecting but I reckon this will work.
Click on the *(sort of) below the book cover for the above info.

Edit click on *(sort of) on George's web site
 
I'm very excited. I don't care how the book is split, as long as I get it.

And George tends to think of the fans, rather than the money. This decision to split the books strikes me more as a way of getting the books to the fans quicker than trying to make a fast buck.

If this were Robert Jordan making the 'sad' decision to split his latest WoT offering, you can bet it'd be all about the money and a way of ekeing the series out further! ;)
 
I wasn't sure about the split when I first read about it - though now I can see the need for it. I would much rather two books than one which had to be heavily edited. That said I'm not sure how well the split will work but we shall soon see.
 
A book in the hand is worth two in the bush! Hallelujah! And I am more interested in Jon than Dany anyway! Woo Hoo! And as Martin declares, it means that the next (additional) installment is that much closer to completion, tho the long-term prospect is that it's a longer story! :eek:
 
Oberon said:
And I am more interested in Jon than Dany anyway!
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Jon won't be in this book will he? He says the focus in the next book will be on the east and the north, which sounds like there isn't going to be any Dany, Jon or the rest of the characters around the Wall in it.
 
Really? I purposely stayed away from spoiler chapters out on the net because I didn't want a taster that would leave me panting for more. :) But that sounds like a very interesting meeting between two of the more interesting characters in the book.


ds
 
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