Honestly, I’m not surprised at all. I’ve had the suspicion that Martin has been struggling with writer’s block since he put himself in a quandary he didn’t know how to get out from with the Red Wedding, and every bit of news that I’ve read since only serves to confirm my suspicions.

Is it really drawing to a close? He’s been working on this one for at least 6 years...Taking that same timeline it’s unlikely to be over for at least another 8 years.

After the show became a hit and he realized it would outpace the books, I think GRRM just said “fuck it, I’ll finish them when I get around to it.” I think he let the show’s writers know the major plotlines and is allowing them to do their own thing now. He’ll probably let them finish the show before he releases the…

Yes well, he took the longest with the last two books, and they sucked (compared to the first three).

To be fair, most of this sympathy is a way for the commentor to say “I’m a writer too!”.

There are are many working authors with children to get to school, help with homework; spouses with all their stuff added to the mix. And they publish really popular series. On time. Being a published author is a business. Being a writer is a craft. GRRM feels horrible for not having the book finished, he truly does.…

Benioff & Weiss were given full permission by GRRM to start the series when they did- they couldn’t have begun it without George’s permission. When George agreed to let them do the show, he was confident he’d finish the whole thing by the time the series ended. Obviously, he did not. In other words Benioff & Weiss are…

Same here. No deadline, no progress!

The opposite is true for me. Give me no timeframe to work against and I hardly get anything done; give me a deadline and I've no choice but to tie myself to my chair until inspiration arrives.

That’s the problem with killing off tons of characters. Eventually you’re going to get in a situation where you are running on low on good characters and everything is moved around to an awkward spot and it’s hard to get everything to the end.

And then sometime last year he said he’d be retooling the whole story after all...

George is absolutely killing me. He doesn’t have the drive to finish this series. He needs to take a good look at how Brandon Sanderson writes. He is 1000x more efficient, way faster, and he still puts out very good books. Books that are in my opinion better than A Song of Ice and Fire.

… maybe he has no words…

Yet another calls for an American city to once again employ the age-old practice of importing black people.

No, I just think that excessive discussion of racism is tasteless and classless.

Race only matters to racists.

Kind of my point. Let's ignore the unbelievable progress made in favour of feeding the OMG Everyone's Racist Trolls. People like that create more racism than they extinguish.

I enjoy most of them tbh. It's just stuff like this that serves no purpose but to wind up the Racism Everywhere Movement that gets a little bit monotone and boring.

I guess the point is entertainment.. for those that enjoy being pissed off? I mean, Oregon is a bastion of alternative-living at the moment. It's so far removed from any of this that it's safe to say it's completely irrelevant. It's just more ammo for people that love to 1) be pissed off 2) call other people…

Not sure what the point of this article is. America has a racist past? No way.