Preston Jacobs Explains the Main Problem with The Winds of Winter and George Finishing the Story

▬▬ Description ▬▬

Preston answers a question on why the book is taking so long and if he thinks it'll be released anytime soon

▬▬ Links ▬▬

▬▬ Information ▬▬

Carmine of RedTeamReview and Preston Jacobs discuss all things A Song of Ice and Fre and everything in between from the characters, to theories and even the latest episodes and news from HBO's television adaptation: Game of Thrones. New episodes debut every month on either Carmine or Preston's channels as well as SoundCloud.

#gameofthrones #houseofthedragon #podcast #hbomax

[BruhMoment-mnkn]

Maybe the real 'Song of Ice and Fire' was the friends we made along the way....

[stasonfrost]

At this point, I'm beginning to question if davos will even find the one piece

[paulbarry]

I’m a long time publisher, and have had a number of authors who’ve gone off the rails like George, bitten off too much and then can’t finish. I think he needs a co-author. Elio and Linda might be acceptable to him. They structure the story, make decisions that George can’t or won’t, but don’t actually write chapters. They just push him forward. I suspect his problem is that he’s now done the easy stuff - written the chapters where he knew what was happening. The problem then isn’t time, it’s decisions. And decisions can be delayed forever. I’d recommend that, and/or serialise Winds. The fandom goes crazy over a single chapter. Release a chapter a month. He probably has 40 chapters complete. That keeps his 10, 000 biggest fans happy for 3+ years and the drip drip pressure of knowing he only has to finish a chapter a month might push him onto completing the book before those 40 months have passed. I doubt it’d even diminish book sales.

[eugenebebs]

Now I understand why George loves working with TV.
"The author shits, the showrunner picks up loose ends."

[JoPo]

One thing I will point out.
Here in the UK A Storm Of Swords was released as two books because it was so big, Part 1 and Part 2.
In Part 2 every 50 pages was big events. Red Wedding, Purple Wedding, Several attacks on the wall, Tyrion's Trial etc etc.
A lot of stuff was wrapped up and the events is very dense. Winds Of Winter could be similar.

[ethankendall]

This is one of the major problems of gardener style writers. The ride is entertaining and interesting, but tend to not have well put together endings.

[hypatiakovalevskayasklodow]

Those “unnecessary” things made the story good and readable. It made it real. It wouldn’t be the same story without the filling

[bram_]

Kill the dwarf. Kill the dwarf, Sweetrobin, so that the giant can be born

[ModuliOfRiemannSurfaces]

I do hope he does some significant cast burning in WoW so that whatever notes for Dream of Spring that leak out after he dies are coherent enough to paint a picture for us

[jessecooks]

This sounds like if Tolkien wanted to write the silmarilion and lotr at the same time and in the same fucking books.

[paulcato]

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."

[TensaZangetsu]

The question shouldn't be if WoW is coming out, it's whether Dream of Spring is ever coming out

[rainluna]

It seems mentioning Chroyane or The Sorrows wasn't needed but it does have a big part to play, mostly because it explains where all the stone men are left, and what happened to Tyrion who passed through on the boat. and how Jon Connington gets greyscale, which will be a massive impact later on as he's now in Westeros. Its weird that he's got greyscale and there's a reason why. It also gives us an understanding of the background, such as what happened there long ago at the spice wars.

[margaretgarside]

I've resigned myself to never seeing this book. If I'm wrong, I'll be thrilled.

[carastone]

10 months later. It's now 4/23/2024 - still no The Winds of Winter :-(

[avatarname]

The most mind boggling thing is him still wanting to finish in 2 books idk how he thinks thats possible the stage he has set is like a 12 book series now

[marcmarc]

The problem with Winds is that he start 2 new storylines: The iron islands and dorne

[bryanfish]

Given that we know the story and characters have evolved in so many ways over the years and the song has become so much more than the author originally intended; why can't the idea of only having two more books to complete the story also be revised? I'm not so desperate to see the conclusion as I am to see further chapters and development.

I really think setting this arbitary deadline has created the problem of trying to conclude everything all at once, when, in reality, there are so many disparate stories, it doesn't even make sense for them all to directly collide. The potential war between Aegon and Dany could fill a few books alone

[anonymous-hzun]

In short, the plot after SOS is complete clusterfuck.

[szymonlechdzieciol]

I'd add there is one major aspect simmilar to one you described that should be counted.

Original ASOIAF plan was trilogy very different from what we get, but later plan like alpha of this saga was two trilogies with 5 year gap between them.
GAP between SoS and DwD.

And we can see that GRRM was kinda putting our young heroes in places where they could spend 5 years in training, growing, to jump easily - Bran crossed the Wall to find 3 eye raven, Sansa become Littlefinger protege, Arya moved to Braavos, Jon become Lord Commander, Dany decided to stay in Meereen, and so on and so on.

But there were important fiddly bits despite it that would make GRRM plan very hard - Stannis would definitely not stay on Wall 5 years waiting for Boltons to died on their own, King's Landing was left in great mess so did Riverlands. That would make explaining all those things AFTER gap extremely hard. On the other hand - without gap he has problem with kid heroes that should become young adults by Westeros standards - so he tried to fill the gap, and this just was too much. CoK and SoS together was less than a year (in fact I think GRRM was pushing things too fast, medieval wars were usually slow, grinding endeavours - he could totally for instance make realistic long sieges instead of unrealistic successful storming after storming and allow political situation to stagnate for months - and timeline to progress SLOWLY with simmilar ammount of chapters and bigger gaps) - and here he had gap of 5 years.

It was doomed to collapse.