The artist and their audience

[fumi]

I read this really interesting piece on the author George R. R Martin. 

 

Actually it's more about the relationship between an artist and their fans. Some of it is really scary stuff. There are some weird people out there.

 

After I read it, I immediately thought of this forum!

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/11/110411fa_fact_miller?currentPage=all

 

Regards

[MAXIMUS MISCHIEF]

george rr martin is the frigin man

[fumi]

Here's the whole thing.

The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But the pilot for “Doorways,” a series he’d developed, hadn’t been picked up, and he was tired of the medium’s limitations. “Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft,” he told me recently. He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and producers always made him cut that stuff. A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained to him, “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.”

 

On the printed page, however, he could have it all. He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want.” In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real.

 

Although “A Game of Thrones” was not initially a hit, it won the passionate advocacy of certain independent booksellers, who recommended it to their customers, who, in turn, pressed copies on their friends. A following was born, albeit a spotty one. Parris McBride, Martin’s wife, recalls, “When George went on the first signing tour for the series, the manager at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, in Kentucky, had four hundred people waiting for him. A few weeks later, he’s in St. Louis, and nobody turns up for the signing at all.”

 

The days when nobody showed up for a Martin signing are long gone. In January, at a hastily scheduled appearance at Vroman’s Bookstore, in Pasadena, hundreds of fans waited in a line that coiled around the store. They presented Martin with volumes from “A Song of Ice and Fire” and works from his early years as a science-fiction writer, as well as with calendars, posters, e-readers, yellowing pulp magazines, and replica swords. Three young women wore handmade T-shirts emblazoned with the coats of arms of their favorite clans from the series. Martin was unflaggingly attentive to his supplicants, including the couple who asked him to pose for a photograph with their infant daughter, who was named Daenerys, for one of his heroines.

 

Martin has now sold more than fifteen million books worldwide, and his readership will likely multiply exponentially after the launch, this month, of “Game of Thrones,” a lavish HBO series based on “A Song of Ice and Fire.” He is committed to nurturing his audience, no matter how vast it gets. “It behooves a writer to be good to his fans,” he says. He writes a lively blog, and though he has an assistant, Ty Franck, who screens the multitude of comments that are posted on it, he tries to read many of them himself. A fan in Sweden, Elio M. García, Jr., maintains an official presence for Martin on Facebook and Twitter, and also runs the main “Ice and Fire” Web forum, Westeros.org. (Westeros is the name of the fictional continent that is home to the Seven Kingdoms.) When Martin is travelling, which is often, he attends the gatherings of the Brotherhood Without Banners, an unofficial fan club with informal chapters around the world, and he counts its founders and other longtime members among his good friends. In many respects, he’s a model for contemporary authors confronted with a wobbly publishing industry and a fractured marketplace. Anne Groell, Martin’s editor at Random House, tells her authors, “Outreach and building community with readers is the single most important thing you can do for your book these days. You need to make them feel invested in your career.”

 

Still, a close relationship with one’s audience has its drawbacks. As Martin puts it, “The more readers you have, the harder it is to keep up, and then you can’t get any writing done.” He added to his burden when he decided that his planned trilogy needed to be at least a seven-book series. “The tale grew in the telling,” Martin often says, quoting J. R. R. Tolkien, a writer he greatly admires.

 

The tale also got stalled. There has been no addition to the “Song of Ice and Fire” series since 2005, when the fourth volume appeared. And that book, titled “A Feast for Crows,” was only half a novel: it had been surgically removed from a manuscript that, at twelve hundred pages, still wasn’t complete nearly five years after the publication of the third volume. Because “A Feast for Crows” followed the adventures of a number of new characters—and left the fates of several popular characters unresolved after the previous book’s cliffhanger ending—some fans were disappointed by it. Martin included a postscript in “A Feast for Crows,” explaining what he’d done—and then, as he told me, “I made the fatal mistake of saying, ‘But the other book is half-written and I should be able to finish it within a year.’ ”

 

In the six years since, some of Martin’s fans have grown exceedingly restless. The same blogging culture that allows a fantasy writer like Neil Gaiman to foster a sense of intimacy with his readers can also expose an author to relentless scrutiny when they become discontented. Fans desperate to find out what happened to Martin characters like Tyrion Lannister—a smart, cynical dwarf born into one of the most powerful families in the Seven Kingdoms—found it irksome to check Martin’s Web site for updates about the series’ fifth book, “A Dance with Dragons,” and find instead postings about sports or politics. They began to complain in the comments section of Martin’s blog and on Westeros.org.

 

As the chief moderator of Westeros.org, García deleted forum posts that he regarded as “not constructive,” including increasingly wild speculation about the cause of the delay and the ultimate fate of the series. Martin’s blog was similarly monitored. Even so, the discontent soon spilled over into other platforms—from science-fiction and fantasy forums to discussion boards on Amazon.com. One poster wrote, “George R. R. Martin, you suck. . . . Pull your fucking typewriter out of your ass and start fucking typing.” Another joked that Martin had written a book called “How to Cash in Big Time After You Write Half a Series.” Such invective has flourished even after Martin, in early March, announced that “A Dance with Dragons” will finally be published on July 12th. One skeptic, posting on Amazon.com, said of the release date, “Don’t hold your breath on this one unless you like passing out.”

 

An entire community of apostates—a shadow fandom—is now devoted to taunting Martin, his associates, and readers who insist that he has been hard at work on the series and has the right to take as much time as he needs. Even Gaiman got dragged into the feud when he responded, on his own blog, to an inquiry about Martin’s tardiness by issuing this reproof: “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”

 

The online attacks on Martin suggest that some readers have a new idea about what an author owes them. They see themselves as customers, not devotees, and they expect prompt, consistent service. Martin, who is sixty-two, told me that Franck calls the disaffected readers the Entitlement Generation: “He thinks they’re all younger people, teens and twenties. And that their generation just wants what they want, and they want it now. If you don’t give it to them, they’re pissed off.”

 

artin and McBride live in a stucco house in Santa Fe. Martin also owns the place across the street, which he uses as an office. He’s converted the closets into dioramas to display his large collection of miniatures. Most of them are medieval, with the knights outnumbering infantrymen—“I like the pageantry and the color,” he told me, his voice still tinged with the accent of his home town, Bayonne, New Jersey. When I visited, in January, Martin, a short, portly man whose jaw is fringed with a gray beard, opened a door in the hallway to show me a tiny scene from the banqueting room of a castle, complete with gossiping ladies, an amorous couple, dogs begging for scraps, and a drunk passed out with his head on the table.

 

Like his closets, Martin’s head is crammed with people. By García’s count, there are already more than a thousand named characters in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” although many of them are mentioned only in passing. Martin was startled by the size of García’s census, but he enjoys being surprised by his own work. He thinks of himself as a “gardener”—he has a rough idea where he’s going but improvises along the way. He sometimes fleshes out only as much of his imaginary world as he needs to make a workable setting for the story. Tolkien was what Martin calls an “architect.” Tolkien created entire languages, mythologies, and histories for Middle-earth long before he wrote the novels set there. Martin told me that many of his fans assume that he is as meticulous a world-builder as Tolkien was. “They write to say, ‘I’m fascinated by the languages. I would like to do a study of High Valyrian’ ”—an ancient tongue. “ ‘Could you send me a glossary and a dictionary and the syntax?’ I have to write back and say, ‘I’ve invented seven words of High Valyrian.’ ”

 

Tolkien created the genre of epic fantasy, and it is still dominated by his example. Martin is widely credited with taking such fiction in a more adult direction. David Benioff, who, with Dan Weiss, is an executive producer of the HBO series, told me that he had given up reading fantasy because “so many of the writers seemed to be a pale imitation of Tolkien. After a while, you don’t need to read another book about hobbits or hobbit-like creatures trying to destroy some evil artifact.”

 

A typical post-Tolkien epic fantasy is the best-selling “Wheel of Time” series, by Robert Jordan. David McCaman, a marketing executive and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, dismissively summarizes the genre this way: “The young kid on the farm discovers he has powers, and no one dies, and they find the magic to rule the world.” He calls it “Nerf fantasy,” meaning that “it’s really safe.” By contrast, “A Song of Ice and Fire” doesn’t truck with “orcs and goblins and dark lords and bad and good. It revolves around people, really gritty people, and real situations, things that you don’t see in fantasy—sex and language and betrayal.” Benioff once told New York that “Game of Thrones” was “ ‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth,” and although he now winces at the formulation, it remains sound; the book’s intricate, racy narrative practically feels custom-built for HBO. The series especially resembles “Rome” and “Deadwood,” although, unlike them, it’s free from even the most perfunctory obligation to be historically accurate.

 

Martin’s characters indulge in all the usual vices associated with the Middle Ages, and some of them engage in behavior—most notably, incest—that would shock people of any historical period. Characters who initially seem likable commit reprehensible acts, and apparent villains become sympathetic over time. Martin transgressed the conventions of his genre—and most popular entertainment—by making it clear that none of his characters were guaranteed to survive to the next book, or even to the next chapter. “When Indiana Jones goes up against that convoy of forty Nazis, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s not ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he explained. He wants readers to feel that “they love the characters and they’re afraid for the characters.”

 

The serial nature of “A Song of Ice and Fire” is key to the involvement it elicits. Although story lines conclude in each of the novels, the larger narrative arc remains unresolved, encouraging readers to speculate about what might ultimately happen. Online forums are an ideal place to debate rival theories, allowing participants to forge the emotional bonds that define contemporary fandom.

 

“George and I are fans first,” McBride told me. During his teen-age years in New Jersey, Martin wrote for comic-book fanzines, inventing his own superheroes and writing new adventures for the superheroes created by other fans. But it was in science-fiction fandom that he found a lasting home.

 

Martin attended his first science-fiction convention in 1971. At the registration desk, he was greeted by Gardner Dozois, who, coincidentally, had pulled from the slush pile of the magazine Galaxy Martin’s first professionally published story, “The Hero.” (It appeared in 1970.) The two men remain friends and collaborators. Martin attends about six conventions a year, and he says that since college “virtually all the women in my life, including Parris, were people I met at science-fiction conventions.”

 

When Martin and McBride met, at a convention in Nashville in 1975, she told him that one of his stories, “A Song for Lya,” had made her cry. The gathering was in the free-spirited mode of the times—in an autobiographical essay, Martin notes that, when this conversation took place, they were both naked. (He does not elaborate.) He was, however, engaged to someone else. McBride went to work for a travelling circus for a while. By the time he moved to Santa Fe, in 1979, she was waiting tables in Portland, Oregon. They’d kept in touch, and after his marriage broke up they began what McBride calls a “fannish romance,” meeting at conventions and exchanging letters. In 1981, he persuaded her to move to New Mexico.

 

McBride likes living in Santa Fe—the area has a “strong fan group.” She calls the science-fiction community “my perfect tribe.” With Martin, she has tried to instill the Brotherhood Without Banner with the mores of her generation of fans. The Brotherhood, whose origins can be traced to a convention ten years ago in Philadelphia, doesn’t charge a membership fee or have a defined organizational structure. Anything too official, in McBride’s opinion, “is not the fannish way.”

 

In the Brotherhood, local gatherings are called “moots.” On the night of the Pasadena book signing, a moot was held in the back yard of a Spanish-style house in town. Brotherhood members from way back mingled with relative newcomers. Martin leaned against the railing of a deck, drinking beer and swapping anecdotes about past conventions.

 

There is no doubt where the Brotherhood’s members come down on the question of the long wait for “A Dance with Dragons.” One group at the party responded with head-shaking and exclamations of disgust when Martin informed them, “I’m still getting e-mail from assholes who call me lazy for not finishing the book sooner. They say, ‘You better not pull a Jordan.’ ” Robert Jordan, whose real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr., died of amyloidosis in 2007, before the “Wheel of Time” series was finished. (Another writer, Brandon Sanderson, will finish it.) Martin said that he found such remarks particularly heartless: “I knew Jim, which is what his friends called him. He was a friend of mine.”

 

“How dare he die?” a woman said, witheringly. “I mean, what an inconvenience to the fans.”

 

Several veterans briefed me on the group’s traditions. At that first Brotherhood party, in 2001, a tipsy reveller (this is a crowd that likes to lift a glass) asked Martin to knight him. Martin said, “I can’t knight you. You haven’t gone on a quest yet!” When his petitioner implored Martin to invent one, he sent the fan and several others off in search of Philly cheesesteaks. When their prize was secured, Martin dubbed the group the Knights of the Cheesesteak. So began the custom of Martin sending fans off in the middle of the night with orders to bring back local street food. The Brotherhood quests are a gentler version of a fraternity hazing, providing people who have in common only a particular literary taste with the shared experiences that turn them into pals.

 

It was a brisk night, and as we clustered by a clay fireplace a fan named Erik Kluth recalled the moot in Kansas City where he was knighted. Martin had commanded him and some other fans to retrieve barbecued smoked brisket tips. But by the time Martin issued his decree restaurants had closed. In desperation, the fans rooted through garbage left outside one establishment. Finally, they tried to cook the dish themselves, in a drug-store parking lot. Martin was impressed enough by the effort to dub them the Knights of the Dumpster.

 

I also met Kim Ohara, a soft-spoken woman who has been a Brotherhood member since the first moot. She told me that, even on Internet forums dedicated to Martin’s work, much of the discussion isn’t about “A Song of Ice and Fire.” “You can talk about the books only so much,” she said. Once the fans get to know each other, the focus tends to shift to the stories of their own lives. Several Brotherhood members had got married. In one case, Martin assisted a fan by signing one of the “Ice and Fire” novels with a remarkable inscription: a marriage proposal to another fan.

 

lio García estimates that he spends up to thirty-five hours a month supervising Westeros.org, the “Song of Ice and Fire” discussion site. García, a Cuban-American, moved to Sweden to be with his girlfriend in 1999, the same year that the two of them established Westeros.org. She had introduced him to Martin’s series, and he soon shared her obsession with it. The site now has about seventeen thousand registered members. Despite his attachment to the books, García did not get to meet Martin or his fellow-fans until 2005. “I never really did the whole convention thing,” he told me. “I consider a lot of these people friends. But they’re not physical, next-door-neighbor friends. They are people I know on the Internet.”

 

García is a superfan. His knowledge of Martin’s invented world is so encyclopedic that the author has referred HBO researchers to him when they have questions regarding the production of “Game of Thrones.” Although García’s participation in Westeros.org is voluntary, his involvement with Martin’s work has become semi-professional. He is being paid to consult with licensors creating tie-in merchandise and to write text for a video game based on the series. He and Martin are collaborating on a comprehensive guide to the books, “The World of Ice and Fire.” Martin himself sometimes checks with García when he’s not sure he’s got a detail right. Martin told me, “I’ll write something and e-mail him to ask, ‘Did I ever mention this before?’ And he writes me right back: ‘Yes, on page 17 of Book Four.’ ”

 

The proliferation of plot elements is a major reason that Martin’s writing pace has slowed. “A Song of Ice and Fire primarily takes place over several years on a continent about the size of South America. Each chapter is narrated in the third person, from the point of view of a single character. The first book had eight major viewpoint characters, but by “A Feast for Crows” the total for the series had grown to seventeen, each in a different location and enmeshed in a complex plot—fighting in wars, journeying through arduous terrain, scheming to steal a throne.

 

Making sure that the chronologies of the different stories line up has particularly bedevilled Martin. He said, “I have to ask myself, ‘How long is it going to take this character to get from point A to point B by ship? Meanwhile, what’s happened in the other book? If it’s going to take him this long, but in the other book I said that he’d already arrived there, then I’m in trouble. So I have to have him leave earlier.’ That kind of stuff has driven me crazy.” Last year, he wrote on his blog, “I know perfectly well that as soon as ‘Dance’ is published, some of you out there are going to attempt to correlate its chronology with that of ‘A Feast for Crows.’ . . . Well, it may well make your head explode. It did mine. The ‘Dance’ timeline alone is a bitch and a half.”

 

Martin is in the unusual position of being a writer whose work is attended to even more closely by his readers than by himself. And, as the panorama of “A Song of Ice and Fire” has grown ever more expansive, Martin has become increasingly afraid that he’ll make mistakes. He has already made some tiny ones: “My fans point them out to me. I have a horse that changes sex between books. He was a mare in one book and a stallion in the next, or something like that.” The eyes of one supporting character are described as green in one passage and blue in another. As Martin puts it, “People are analyzing every goddam line in these books, and if I make a mistake they’re going to nail me on it.”

 

Norwegian schoolteacher named Remy Verhoeve is one of these hyper-dedicated readers. Until a friend persuaded him to try “A Game of Thrones,” he had never especially liked fantasy fiction, with the exception of “The Lord of the Rings.” In his opinion, the first three volumes of “A Song of Ice and Fire” are “the finest novels I’ve ever read.” After discovering the series, he read those three books ten times each. “Sometimes some piece of art comes along and changes everything,” he told me. Yet Verhoeve, operating under the nom de guerre of Slynt, now runs a Web forum dedicated to denigrating Martin and his supporters. The site is called Is Winter Coming?—a snide play on “Winter is coming,” the motto of the Starks, one of the central families in the series.

 

Like every protracted Internet war, the schism in Martin’s fandom is difficult to comprehend from the outside. Each camp nurses grievances against the other, and any conversation between the two degenerates into ad-hominem attacks. (Actually, the quarrel may never have consisted of anything but ad-hominem attacks.) Hunkered down in their respective forts, each side magnifies its own indignation. Yet if you chat with one of the participants he or she will claim to be dispassionate. “Personally, I just feel kind of sad for them,” García said of his foes.

 

In Verhoeve’s telling, disaffected fans—who sometimes call themselves GRRuMblers—formed a renegade movement in 2009, after Martin posted a blog entry titled “To My Detractors.” It was Martin’s attempt to deliver a definitive response to “the rising tide of venom about the lateness of ‘A Dance with Dragons.’ ” He went on, “Some of you are angry that I watch football during the fall.” Other online posters, he noted, objected to him “visiting places like Spain and Portugal (last year) or Finland (this year).” The post ended, “As some of you like to point out in your e-mails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don’t want me to ‘pull a Robert Jordan’ on you and deny you your book. Okay, I’ve got the message. You don’t want me doing anything except ‘A Song of Ice and Fire.’ Ever. (Well, maybe it’s okay if I take a leak once in a while?)”

 

Verhoeve, who has been banned from Westeros.org, was incensed by Martin’s post, and a few days later he set up Is Winter Coming? The forum’s tone was inspired by Finish the Book, George, a blog begun in 2008 by two brothers using the monikers Pesci and Liotta—a reference to two actors from the gangster film “GoodFellas.” The pseudonymous pair had taken their cue from another Martin blog post, this one admonishing visitors to stay on topic or butt out. (“If you want to comment on other matters, including, but not limited to, the lateness of ‘A Dance with Dragons,’ that’s fine, just go do it on your own blogs.”) In response, Pesci and Liotta began publishing one blistering post after another, making them heroes, of a sort, to the detractors. One post reads, “Since we all know GRRM can’t write unless he is in his special place with his special writing booties on and the temperature at exactly 69 degrees and the sun aligned with Aquarius, I take this as another sign that the big guy hasn’t typed a word of ADWD today.”

 

The brothers have been less active of late, but Is Winter Coming? is humming with hostile creativity. So far, the forum has produced a “field guide” to the various types of Martin defenders and how they may be refuted; a pseudo-legal brief titled “The People Against George R. R. Martin”; detailed charts attempting to expose how few hours Martin has devoted to writing “A Dance with Dragons” per year, based on his blog postings; and a three-hundred-page “Encyclopedia GRRuMbliana,” which includes a spirited history of the forum. Members have also written “A Feast for Trolls” and “A Dance with Detractors,” long parodic narratives, in the style of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which feature broad caricatures of Martin and his key defenders, including Gaiman. A small publishing house made a deal with Verhoeve to compile some of his blog postings into a book, to be titled “Waiting for Dragons.”

 

This is an astonishing amount of effort to devote to denouncing the author of books one professes to love. Few contemporary authors can claim to have inspired such passion. The HBO team of Benioff and Weiss, novelists themselves, were taken aback when I told them about the shadow sites. “I’m going to start an Ian McEwan troll site,” Weiss joked. “I love him, but . . . ”

 

“Where is ‘Atonement II’?” Benioff interjected. “We’ve been waiting and waiting.”

 

Martin knows what it’s like to be provoked by a serial entertainment. He experienced it himself as a faithful viewer of “Lost,” the ABC adventure series about a group of castaways trapped on a mysterious island. “I kept watching it and I was fascinated,” he recalls. “They’d introduce these things and I thought that I knew where it was going. Then they’d introduce some other thing and I’d rethink it.”

 

Like many “Lost” fans, Martin resented the series’s mystical ending, which left dozens of narrative threads dangling. “We watched it every week trying to figure it out, and as it got deeper and deeper I kept saying, ‘They better have something good in mind for the end. This end better pay off here.’ And then I felt so cheated when we got to the conclusion.” He does think of himself as being bound by an informal contract with his readers; he feels that he owes them his best work. He doesn’t, however, believe that this gives them the right to dictate the particulars of his creative process or to complain about how he manages his time.

 

Although some detractors, like Verhoeve, attribute their disgust with Martin to what they view as his poor P.R. skills and “lack of proper communication,” the essence of their complaint is transactional. In one posting, Liotta fumed that he and “literally hundreds of thousands of other people have spent countless hours and dollars in faithful dedication” to Martin’s work. It makes little difference to these fans that they knew the series wasn’t finished when they started reading it, and that they still own the books they spent all that time and money on. As far as the detractors are concerned, Martin’s contract with them was for a story, their engagement with it offered on the understanding that he would provide them with a satisfying conclusion.

 

Contrary to what his more extravagant critics allege, Martin insists that he has been working continuously on “A Dance with Dragons.” “They have all these insane theories that the book has been finished for years, but I’m sitting on it until the HBO series comes out so I’ll make more money,” he says. “Or I farmed out the book to another writer, or I’ve lost all interest in the series and now I just want to do other stuff.”

 

Nevertheless, I pointed out, “A Dance with Dragons” has taken him longer than any of the preceding four novels. “Maybe I’m rewriting too much,” he suggested, after a fretful silence. “Maybe I have perfectionist’s disease, or whatever.” We were seated in an addition to his office that he calls his “library tower.” Built in 2009, the renovation has provoked a mixture of scorn and resentment among his detractors, who alternately regard it as a faux-medieval affectation and as a flaunting of the wealth that they believe has dulled Martin’s motivation to finish the series. It’s a handsome but hardly extravagant structure lined with bookshelves, a tower only in comparison with the low-lying architectural style common to Santa Fe. Its sole medieval aspect is a set of stained-glass windows with the sigils of five houses from the Seven Kingdoms. Although the miniature knights in Martin’s dioramas reminded me of the Technicolor artificiality of a Hollywood costume picture like “Ivanhoe,” the windows looked surprisingly authentic, and I found them beautiful.

 

Martin explained that he’s been tinkering with some parts of “A Dance with Dragons” for ten years. He has a “real love-hate relationship” with a chapter that focusses on Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf: “I ripped it out and put it back in, I ripped it out and put it back in. Then I put it in as a dream sequence, and then I ripped it out again. This is the stuff I’ve been doing.”

 

uch indecision, Martin suspects, may be fuelled by the mounting expectations for “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The reviews for the series have been “orders of magnitude better” than he’s received for anything else. After the fourth volume came out, Time anointed him “the American Tolkien.” Many readers have told Martin that his tale is the greatest fantasy story of all time. With the HBO show and his online critics breathing down his neck, the pressure has become even more intense.

 

“I don’t want to come across as a whiner or a complainer,” Martin said, as tinted light from the afternoon sun filtered through the stained-glass windows. “No! I’m living the dream here. I have all of these readers who are waiting on the book. I want to give them something terrific.” There was a pause. “What if I fuck it up at the end? What if I do a ‘Lost’? Then they’ll come after me with pitchforks and torches.”

 

Martin hopes that, after he surmounts the particularly thorny problems of “A Dance with Dragons,” the final two books will come much faster. Some detractors insist that he’ll never complete the series, and they like to kibbitz about who ought to fill in for him if he pulls a Jordan. Martin, however, has indicated that he will not permit another writer to finish “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The story begins and ends with him.

 

At one point, I posed a question to Remy Verhoeve. Suppose that “A Song of Ice and Fire” never does get a proper ending. He’d still have those three novels, the ones he considers the finest he’s ever read. Would that not be a consolation? He was quiet for a while before answering: “Yeah. I guess it is. Though sometimes I wish I had never read those books.” ♦

 

[Guest hahathhat]

"I don’t want to come across as a whiner or a complainer," Martin said, as tinted light from the afternoon sun filtered through the stained-glass windows. "No! I'm living the dream here. I have all of these readers who are waiting on the book. I want to give them something terrific." There was a pause. "What if I fuck it up at the end? What if I do a 'Lost'? Then they’ll come after me with pitchforks and torches."

 

aphex twin

[fumi]

As the chief moderator of Westeros.org, García deleted forum posts that he regarded as “not constructive,” including increasingly wild speculation about the cause of the delay and the ultimate fate of the series. Martin’s blog was similarly monitored. Even so, the discontent soon spilled over into other platforms—from science-fiction and fantasy forums to discussion boards on Amazon.com. One poster wrote, “George R. R. Martin, you suck. . . . Pull your fucking typewriter out of your ass and start fucking typing.” Another joked that Martin had written a book called “How to Cash in Big Time After You Write Half a Series.” Such invective has flourished even after Martin, in early March, announced that “A Dance with Dragons” will finally be published on July 12th. One skeptic, posting on Amazon.com, said of the release date, “Don’t hold your breath on this one unless you like passing out.”

 

Sounds like the BOC forum.

[Suffocate Peon]

Here's the whole thing.

García is a superfan. His knowledge of Martin’s invented world is so encyclopedic that the author has referred HBO researchers to him when they have questions regarding the production of “Game of Thrones.” Although García’s participation in Westeros.org is voluntary, his involvement with Martin’s work has become semi-professional. He is being paid to consult with licensors creating tie-in merchandise and to write text for a video game based on the series. He and Martin are collaborating on a comprehensive guide to the books, “The World of Ice and Fire.” Martin himself sometimes checks with García when he’s not sure he’s got a detail right. Martin told me, “I’ll write something and e-mail him to ask, ‘Did I ever mention this before?’ And he writes me right back: ‘Yes, on page 17 of Book Four.’ ”

 

That's pretty neat, probably the only advantage to having an obsessive fan.

 

I sometimes wonder what day jobs the two guys from Boards of Canada have, seeing as they don't do gigs.

 

Can't really compare a 60+ year old who writes a blog, visits six conventions a year, and has various writing projects on the go in various mediums to the nothingness of BOC. I don't like them so I don't care, but I think it's sad they don't take advantage of their popularity and do shows, whilst still retaining their mystery by not being visible on stage [somehow]. I much more admire musicians/actors/writers/directors who work tirelessly into old age and aren't such delicate precious pussies about the quality of their output, it's more the attitude of; some of it will be good, some of it won't be as good, on to the next thing.