The thing I always say when I teach any sort of writing workshop is, “I can’t teach you how you write. All I can do is show you my toolbox, and you can rifle through it to find the things that are good for your toolbox.”

Though I can’t speak for any writers but myself, there is a spectrum here as well, I feel. There are those who, as you note, come up with an outline which can be pretty clear in terms of where a novel starts, follows through, and ends, but if I would follow that process I suspect I’d be bored to death doing the actual…

I mean....once he dies, it’ll get published, no?  Sigh.  GRRM probably has a long section of his will covering just this,

Personally my approach is closer to King’s than Martin’s, because I am such a savage critic of myself that I really have to choose between writing the King way or getting nothing done at all. The last time I turned an entire week over to nothing but writing, I was hitting 10,000 words a day - which is probably…

The funny thing is, I’ve never really thought of Martin as having a sparkling prose style (and I’ve been reading him since the ‘80s, and I have the Baen paperback of Tuf Voyaging to prove it). His writing always seemed to have a certain functionality to it. Whereas with King, even if the book is a stinker, there’s…

It’s been speculated that the Coreys will finish the series if GRRM is unable to, though they’ve denied it. Abraham has written some very good, unconventional epic fantasies.

“James S.A. Corey” is an example of finding a middle ground.  They turned out a series of decent books in a relatively short amount of time.  Which is interesting, because Abraham is a friend of Martin’s and Franck used to work for him.

I suspect that if the show did hit the same notes that GRRM intended (which I kind of doubt, aside from Cleganebowl, which was an inevitability), the fact that they were so poorly done and clunky probably highlighted any issues that GRRM might have seen as present in his own work, so likely he re-wrote, as he…

The interesting thing is that prior to ASoIaF GRRM was not known as a guy who wrote big books. He had written a handful of novels, but most of his output was short fiction. I don’t think anyone expected him to write giant fantasy novels. In fact, he was writing a novel set in the space opera universe of his 1970s…

I recently watched that video on YouTube where GRRM asks Stephen King how he writes so fast, and there’s a telling portion that he intended as a joke but is kind of revealing - he says that, when he writes, he’ll write a sentence, and then hate that sentence, and then rewrite it again and again. In a nutshell, that…

I still hold that “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch” is axiomatic. But, y’know, I am not George R.R. Martin’s bitch, either.

Working with writer Dennis O’Neil, Adams transformed Batman into the Dark Knight, turned his villains from goofballs into real threats (especially the Joker), and created the grittier tone

There is no person post-Golden Age that was as ahead of their time and in-tune with the future of comics as Adams was.

Definitely more benign than Frank Miller’s latter-day freakouts.

So sad to see this.

YES! That Superman/Ali book was AMAZING! And that cover with all of the “celebrities” (real and fictional) in the audience!  I studied that as a kid.

Nah, no spoilers. I’d heard about the big, “everything explodes” ending, though it worked better than I thought (even though I think critics were justified for calling it out when so much of the movie worked well as a police procedural).

Been hearing about “superhero fatigue” for about a decade now. With No Way Home doing record numbers and The Batman doing an eyepopping take with a three-hour Zodiac riff, both in the wake of theaters slowly getting back on their feet from the pandemic, and Dr. Strange 2 probably going to do big numbers piggybacking…

Echoing the other sentiments here, I thought The Batman was just fine.

Spot-on casting, masterfully shot, drop-dead gorgeous cinematography, a Gotham that looked and felt like a real live place rather than just straight up boring ass Chicago like in Nolans films or some Gothic/Art-Deco nightmare like Burton and…