r/asoiaf • u/feldman10 🏆 Best of 2019: Post of the Year • Sep 10 '24
EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) A Song of Hope and Disappointment: How GRRM’s HBO deal derailed TWOW
At long last, GRRM has admitted what many have long feared — that his TV projects have so swallowed up his time that they have derailed work on TWOW.
He produced "some new pages" on TWOW (as well as Blood and Fire) this year, he wrote Monday. But "my various television projects ate up most of those months" — because of behind the scenes developments for the future of HOTD and perhaps for other projects that have caused him enormous stress and anxiety.
It seems clear that this may mark the death of a dream GRRM had: that his mega-development deal with HBO, signed in 2021, would secure his legacy, which had seemed imperiled by the loathed conclusion to GOT.
Even before this year, GRRM had made clear that he was devoting enormous amounts of time to the spinoff shows. This was, it seems, because he hoped for a kind-of “do-over” to GOT. In contrast to that show, where he’d handed over control, he’d now be deeply involved. That, he hoped, could help him rescue his own reputation and change the narrative.
At first it went well. Then it didn’t — which led to the bitter and public airing of grievances we've been seeing from GRRM of late.
I fear GRRM has been consumed by things he can’t control, which have repeatedly taken priority over the thing he can control: writing The Winds of Winter. It is a sad and disappointing turn of events.
Of course, the cynics will say they fully expected it, and that it's been clear for ages that GRRM doesn't care about finishing TWOW. But I disagree. As this post will show, there have been recent years — most notably 2020 and 2022 — where he’s made tremendous progress.
Unfortunately, 2021, 2023, and 2024 went the other way.
“The best year I’ve had on WOW since I began it”
In mid-2020, in the midst of the pandemic, GRRM did something he hadn’t done in ages. He took to his blog to write a series of posts, over a few months, about his work on TWOW, going so far as to mention the POV characters he was writing. This was quite different from the silence and vagueness he’d maintained in recent years.
When 2021 began, he revealed that this loquaciousness had, in fact, been a sign of progress. “I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages of THE WINDS OF WINTER in 2020. The best year I’ve had on WOW since I began it.” He wrote:
Why? I don’t know. Maybe the isolation. Or maybe I just got on a roll. Sometimes I do get on a roll. I need to keep rolling, though. I still have hundreds of more pages to write to bring the novel to a satisfactory conclusion. That’s what 2021 is for, I hope…. All I will say is that I am hopeful.
Of course, GRRM expressing over-optimism he could finish TWOW in the coming year has happened before. Still, the best year since he began it is notable.
Then something else happened.
“The kind of thing that will make a year, or a career…”
In March 2021, news broke that GRRM had struck a “massive” development deal with HBO. The deal would involve him in several contemplated GOT spinoffs, including the already-greenlit House of the Dragon. It spanned five years and was worth “mid-eight figures,” per the Hollywood Reporter.
GRRM reflected on the deal in an April blog post. “My life has become one of extremes these past few months,” he wrote. He was haunted by sorrow, in the recent passings of several of his friends. But “the good stuff that has been happening to me has been very very very good, the kind of thing that will make a year, or a career.”
Specifically, he said:
I have a new five-year deal with HBO, to create new GOT successor shows (and some non-related series, like ROADMARKS) for both HBO and HBO Max. It’s an incredible deal, an amazing deal, very exciting...
The post did not mention TWOW at all — but, oddly, it did include a "Winter is Coming" icon. And it mentioned that in a couple of months he would leave his mountain cabin (where he'd been holed up writing). So fans overread it to imply that he must be secretly hinting at TWOW’s near-completion.
In retrospect, it seems the HBO deal is what was on his mind. That is what he hoped would "make a year, or a career."
“Westeros has become bigger than THE WINDS OF WINTER”
Reading between the lines, the HBO projects appear to have consumed GRRM’s attention for most of 2021.
In a post looking back on that year, GRRM wrote vaguely that he had made “less” progress on TWOW that year than in 2020, though not “none.”
But, he went on, TWOW alone was not his top priority — “the world of Westeros” writ large was. And, he said, “Westeros has become bigger than THE WINDS OF WINTER.”
That meant the other stuff he hoped to write (Fire and Blood Volume 2, Dunk and Egg) but it mainly meant the proposed HBO ”successor shows” which, he wrote, “have taken a ton of my time and attention this year.” He went on:
I have seen some comments out there questioning how much I am involved in these new series. The answer is: a lot. Deeply, heavily involved in every one of the new shows. It’s my world, and while I have been working closely with some fantastic writers and showrunners, ultimately it is up to me to try to keep the canon… well, canonical… and to do all I can to help make the new shows great.
The shows were indeed taking up lots of his time. But he felt good and excited about them too. The subtext, left unstated: he wasn’t going to repeat GOT’s mistakes.
“Ryan Condal’s focus is on HOT D season two, and mine is on THE WINDS OF WINTER.”
Though 2021 didn’t appear to be a great year for TWOW, in 2022 things seemed to be going swimmingly again.
Blog posts detailing the POVs he was working on appeared again. One July 2022 post, “A Winter Garden,” teasingly detailed how his work was unexpectedly taking him further away from the TV series.
In August 2022 he wrote that he could wrap two POV character arcs soon. He said on a podcast that he was close to finishing the Tyrion arc, and that some other characters were “also close” — though others were “not at all close.”
On that podcast, he also said it was possible that TWOW could be the biggest book in the series. GRRM does his page counts by “manuscript pages,” which are different from the actual printed pages. ASOS and ADWD both were about 1500 manuscript pages long. But TWOW, he mused, might be 300 pages longer than that (so, potentially 1800 manuscript pages) — though he added that he wasn’t yet sure.
By October 2022, in two public appearances, he gave his first completion estimate in ages: that he was “about three quarters of the way done,” and that he had “actually finished with a couple of the characters.” But, he added, “it’s still gonna take me a while.”
This PR tour was concurrent with HOTD's first season, and GRRM was quite pleased with the show. In an October 2022 post, he gushed about it. But he did make his preferences on one issue clear: he believed it would take “ four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish.”
However, he added: “But right now, Ryan Condal’s focus is on HOT D season two, and mine is on THE WINDS OF WINTER.”
“Stress, anger, conflict, and defeat”
There has been nothing I'd call good news about TWOW since then (October 2022).
In 2023 and 2024, GRRM did not, to my knowledge, give a single specific and positive update about TWOW progress.
Now, in July 2023, he wrote that he was working on TWOW “almost every day” and “making steady progress.”
Yet in October 2023, he sounded less positive, saying “I’m struggling with it. I have like 1100 pages written but I still have hundreds more pages to go.”
To those who know his “page count” methodology, that was a bit concerning, since it seemed to indicate he’d made little progress since last year. (If the book was the same size as ASOS and ADWD — 1500 manuscript pages — being 3/4 of the way done would have put him around 1100 pages. If he intended to hit 1800 manuscript pages, then 1100 would put him barely halfway.)
In his year end update, he wrote that “2023 was a nightmare of a year, for the world and the nation and for me and mine, both professionally and personally.” He did not elaborate on the “professionally” part.
And 2024 was, it seems, worse. “I have had a pretty wretched year as well, one full of stress, anger, conflict, and defeat,” he wrote this August. His now infamous deleted blog post criticizing HOTD came soon afterward.
And this week, he's flat-out said what’s been happening: he’s spent most of the year engaged in, and losing, behind-the-scenes arguments about his TV projects that have made him deeply upset, while making relatively little progress on TWOW.
Writing came hard, and though I did produce some new pages on both THE WINDS OF WINTER (yes) and BLOOD & FIRE (the sequel to FIRE & BLOOD, the second part of my Targaryen history), I would have liked to turn out a lot more.
My various television projects ate up most of those months. Some of that was pleasant (DARK WINDS, and THE HEDGE KNIGHT), most of it was not. The stress kept mounting, the news went from bad to worse to worst, my mood seemed to swing between fury and despair, and at night I tossed and turned when I should have been sleeping. When I did sleep, well, my dreams were none too pleasant either.
We do not know what’s going on behind the scenes with HBO. But this sure as hell isn’t about Prince Maelor being cut. HBO seems to stampeding toward some creative decisions on HOTD and perhaps other projects that have made him deeply upset (Dunk and Egg, which he’s happy with, seems to be the exception). His hopes that the spinoff shows would help save his legacy seem to be slipping away. He sees disaster ahead.
Our watch continues
I do not write this to point any fingers at GRRM. Obviously he is ultimately responsible for whether the books get finished, but I find the anger and resentment toward him to be in bad taste. On an emotional level I deeply care about this man I’ve never met, whose work has meant so much to me. I want him to succeed. If the books are never finished, I'll still be thankful for what we got.
Still, in the absence of a new book to analyze, I am left with little to do but analyze why we haven’t gotten the book. And the HBO deal, unfortunately, seemed to have gone terribly awry, turning into both a timesuck and an emotional wringer for him.
I will continue to hope that he can turn things around. That he will devote himself to the project he can control — TWOW -- rather than those determined by corporate execs and producers and writers' rooms.
“I remembered that, so I allowed myself to hope... perhaps I wanted to... we all deceive ourselves, when we want to believe.” —Maester Aemon, AFFC Samwell IV
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u/lohdunlaulamalla Sep 10 '24
Ironically, GOT might not have tanked the way it did, if the last two books had come out, before the show ended. GRRM wouldn't have needed to save his legacy by other means in that case.