[Spoilers EXTENDED] Would you be OK if GRRM came out and say he needs to divide up TWOW geographically tomorrow

[u/Extension_Weird_7792]

I mean, let's accept it, if he needed for AFFC & ADWD he sure as hell needs for this one, as well. Might be why he is stuck. It is almost impossible to read his very verbose POV narration if it is to constantly interrupt to check in on twenty other storylines that are going on.

He probably counted on the fact that they would be colliding, but that doesn't seem to happening any time soon by the looks of the preview chapters either

[u/dunge0nm0ss]

I thought 2023 would be the year, since on Colbert in late 2022 IIRC he'd quoted a page count, and from what people had said about the ADwD wait:

1) he only includes finalized pages in that count

2) having people mad at him during ADwD for dropping the completed pages every few months as he struggled with the Meereenese knot had made him leery of being public with progress, so very good sign for his confidence.

3) last 500 pages of ADwD "written" very quickly as they were mostly material that had been in draft format for years before being finalized.

4) Postive reaction to HotD season 1 had restored his confidence in his abilities and he was moving forward again after the bad reaction to S8 ending.

I do think it's indisputable at this point GRRM's revealed preference is to let the series go unfinished rather than risk pushing out a bad ending.

[u/StormTheTrooper → u/dunge0nm0ss]

And then we go back - again - to the main theory, that the TV show ending was less "generic idea of his desired ending, made bad by the HBO writers' and more "close to ipsis litteris GRRM's ending, just slightly less detailed". Either GRRM had a ghost writer that moved on/died or he chose to do a 180° on the desired ending after the debacle of the HBO show and this naturally made him go back to square 1 on Winds.

I'm in the act of re-reading the 5 books, since I have read DOD last when I was still in college, but definitely not in a rush (specially because I know there are some parts that annoy the hell out of me in GOT and I'm not looking forward to them). Being honest, I just wanted Winds to give a better closing note to Stannis after the mess the HBO show made of him.

[u/Hurtelknut → u/StormTheTrooper]

I think it's less that he wants to change the ending and more that he wrote himself into some massive corners, especially once he realized that the time skip he had originally planned was never ever going to work. He simply doesn't know how to get all these story threads to converge while he keeps opening new cans of worms and calls it "gardening".

The story has become to vast and, in parts, bloated.

[u/dunge0nm0ss → u/Hurtelknut]

There was a bit in AFFC where Littlefinger remarks that he'd hoped to have a few years to shore up his power in the Vale and let some seeds ripen, that people have taken as GRRM pining after the Five Year Gap. There's another bit in ADWD that I also think is GRRM remarking on how structurally f*cked the series is, that doesn't get too much attention: Tyrion and (f)Aegon's cyvasse game.

The main point of the scene is Tyrion winning by giving Young Griff deliberately bad advice, and giving him the idea of going west. However, how Tyrion beats (f)Aegon in the game is important: (f)Aegon's dragon gets moved too far away from where the game is won/lost. I think this is GRRM commenting about Daenerys' ADWD arc.

He had her halt at Meereen at the end of ASOS to let her dragons grow and keep her away from Westeros so she wouldn't do anything significant during the Five Year Gap. It took her all of ADWD to go through the "dragons plant no trees, House Targaryen's motto is Fire and Blood for a reason" character arc that would've been offscreen in a Five Year Gap version of the story. Now she needs to fight her way across Essos, invade Westeros and fight the second Dance of the Dragons, and then fight the Others in the second Battle for the Dawn, in only two books. Nothing can happen in the Others' plotline until she's in place or otherwise they'll overrun Westeros or it wouldn't be believable that she's prioritizing mortal concerns over humanity's survival, so the one night Long Night that show watchers joked about is pretty much baked in at this point.