Feb 15 2010
Posted by lucas under Life, Literature
When others get irritated at you
It’s sort of irritating, and that irritation is only increased when you are well aware that you don’t deserve it.
Every now and then I go and check George R R Martin’s ‘Not A Blog’ to see how much longer I’ll be waiting for a book that he said would be done within a year, five years ago! In perusing his previous posts, I noticed an irritated mini rant at his blog readers, and I had to investigate.
It turned out that back on the 29th of January, Martin posted a very brief, and rather vague in my opinion, blog post that was titled ‘A Good Day, With Snow‘ and the only contents of said post was ”nuff said’ and the mood listed at the bottom was ‘accomplished’. Now, I took this to mean he’d finished a Jon Snow chapter, but many others didn’t. Comments poured in on the post congratulating Martin for finishing the book, and excitement rose to see when the book would hit the stores. There were also many others like myself who took this post to mean that George had just finished a chapter, but it was easy to see where some had gotten the wrong idea.
The following day, George posted another blog entry, but this one had a lot more in it. This mini rant, entitled ‘No, No, No‘ – as if admonishing a naughty child or disobedient dog – was having a go at his blog readers for trying to ‘decode’ his previous post and assuming that it meant that A Dance With Dragons was done. He made a comment about this being why he hated to make updates, and that all he was saying was that he’d had a particularly good day of writing. To that I say, for a person who makes their livelihood off of communication, he should be able to readily understand why his ambiguous post got the hopes up of many readers.
Quite frankly, the idea of Martin being aggravated with us, his readers, for the understandable assumption that that terribly obscure post meant that the next ASoIaF book was finished is quite preposterous. Sure, I thought it was quite clearly about Jon Snow, but it’s much like an optical illusion, it’s easy to see two different images contained in the small amount of information given in that post.
The fact that fans of this series have had to wait five years for the second half of the last book is bloody ridiculous. The first in the series was released back in 1996, and at that point it was set to be a trilogy. Book two was released in 1999, book three in 2000, and book four in 2005. We are now to expect seven books in the series, but if Martin keeps this writing pace up – and lack of focus, in my opinion – we’ll be waiting on the final instillation till 2020!