Excerpt from The Winds Of Winter - possible spoilers - Book 6

donnacha

http://georgerrmartin.com/if-sample.html

MOD EDIT - Added spoiler warning to thread title, incase like me folks don't want to know or accidentally wander in

beardedmaster

Always imagined her to be such a babe...

Mickeroo

"He believes in me. I will not fail him."

Poor girl hasn't a hope.

Mr Freeze

Deadly a new sample chapter. (new to me anyways).

Will read this shortly.

Gbear

Does anyone else think Martin's website looks like a heap of ****e?:pac:

Sleepy

It's quite 1999 alright....

Still, would rather he focused on ASOIAF than waste time on his website!

super_furry

I'm finding it harder and harder to care. I've read each of his books multiple times but there's been such a drop off in quality over the last couple that I'm struggling to maintain interest in a series that's meandering all over the place now.

Mr Freeze

I still care, & my interest is still high.

But there is no doubt, that there has been a drop off in quality since A Storm Of Swords.

Dance was an improvement over Feast, but not as good as I was hoping it to be. He needs to tie up a load of plot threads in the next book.

But the sample chapters so far for Winds have been good. Especially the

Theon one

. Spoiler tag it, just in case.

Mickeroo

Mr Freeze wrote: »

I still care, & my interest is still high.

But there is no doubt, that there has been a drop off in quality since A Storm Of Swords.

Dance was an improvement over Feast, but not as good as I was hoping it to be. He needs to tie up a load of plot threads in the next book.

But the sample chapters so far for Winds have been good. Especially the

Theon one

. Spoiler tag it, just in case.

The main problem with ADWD I had was it felt like a book with the ending missing. It spent the whole time building to a climax that never appeared. The next book will probably be a bit disjointed now because it will more or less have to finish ADWD before it really starts.

Mr Freeze

^ Agreed.

I was fully expecting Meeren to fully dealt with in Dance.

Mickeroo

Mr Freeze wrote: »

^ Agreed.

I was fully expecting Meeren to fully dealt with in Dance.

Exactly, and I'm pretty sure Martin has admitted that that was to be the case originally. As much as I love the books I really think he needs to be more disciplined as a storyteller.

Gbear

And I guess that settles what happened to Aurane Waters.

Sleepy

A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons would have worked best if written in sequential order rather than the split of events by geography imo. I re-read them in this order and it flowed far better. The one catch was that it spoiled

the reveal that Doran Martell was a Targaryen loyalist all along (which was kind of obvious anyway)

.

The books also suffer heavily when read directly after A Storm of Swords. The pacing of the series takes a drastic shift as far more subtle elements of the Game of Thrones are happening in this sequence. This wasn't as jarring for those who had to wait for the later books but for those who've started to read them since, it really can put you off.

On second and subsequent readings of AFFC and ADWD, you find far, far more in them than you'd have picked up if, like me, you began to devour the series with late night reading sessions because you couldn't wait to see what would happen next! This is true of the earlier books too of course, but not nearly to the same extent imo. Linda, one of the two uber fans who host and maintain Westeros.org, has actually declared AFFC her favourite of the books to date. (the story of Elio and Linda is worth a google on it's own: they've gone from hosting a fan-site to being credited co-authors on the "World of Fire and Ice" worldbook due out later this year - Martin actually calls them up when he can't remember a bit characters eye colour etc!).

That said, I think the quality of the prose has suffered somewhat in later books. Possibly down to the publishers rushing them out instead of taking the time to let an editor do his/her job properly? Repetitive use of certain phrases such as "useless as nipples on a breastplate" can throw you out of the story. It's a shame because the story is still great, the writing isn't necessarily that bad, it just appears to be poorly edited.

Martin had intended for Dance to be longer, it was at his Publishers insistence that "two major events" (battles at Winterfell and Mereen?) were moved to Winds of Winter due to difficulties/costs involved in publishing such large volumes.

WindmillWarrior

Agree with Sleepy. I'm currently doing a re-read of the series and I'm going for the Feast/Dance megabook option and finding both books much more enjoyable than I did on the first read as a result.

http://boiledleather.com/post/25902554148/a-new-reader-friendly-combined-reading-order-for-a

Gbear

WindmillWarrior wrote: »

Agree with Sleepy. I'm currently doing a re-read of the series and I'm going for the Feast/Dance megabook option and finding both books much more enjoyable than I did on the first read as a result.

http://boiledleather.com/post/25902554148/a-new-reader-friendly-combined-reading-order-for-a

Interesting from that(spoilers, obviously):

The explanation:

When I first created the original version of this reading order, I was in the middle of a re-read of the series and had just finished A Storm of Swords. At a certain point along the way I got to thinking about how to approach A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Now that both books have been published, there are options available to us that never were before.

George R.R. Martin famously took years to finish Feast after Storm came out, and infamously took even more years to finish Dance after Feast came out. As we know, this came down to several problems. First, he’d intended to have a five-year jump in the narrative following the conclusion of Storm, but after about a year of writing he realized it wasn’t working and had to start over. Then, once he’d started over, he discovered that while the five-year jump didn’t work for most of the storylines, it worked really well for a few, and it was hard to get them right without it. Then he realized that he had way too many characters and way too much story to fit in one volume as planned, and he needed to decide how to split one volume into two – should he tell half the story for all the characters, or (nearly) all the story for half the characters? (He chose the latter solution.) Finally, he struggled with something called “The Meereenese Knot.” To discuss this I’d have to get a little bit spoilery, but it boiled down to how to get a whole bunch of characters to the place where a certain other character was, and in what order, and whether to have all of them get there by the end of Dance, and what to do with the character toward whom they’re traveling while they’re on their way.

As you’d quickly discover were you to read Feast as written, fans who read Storm when it came out had to wait a decade to find out how the stories of many of their favorite characters continued, since Martin decided to save those characters’ storylines for Dance — despite the fact that in story time, many of those storylines pick up almost immediately after we left them. Even someone like me, who was late to the party and first read the series about a year, year and a half before Dance ended up coming out, had a delay. In my case it was a delay long enough to read the entire series, then read it over again, then have a month or two to wait before Dance came out. Between the real-world delay and the weird sensation of following half the characters’ stories for a while in Feast before looping back in time to catch up with the other characters in Dance, reading that latter book can feel a little wonky for some readers.

bradyle

Ok so had read up as far as DwD when it came out but kinda distanced myself from the books just because I didnt want to be thinking of them the whole time becaise id be insane by the time they came out!

At the time this seemed like a good idea...but now I just realised I missed excerpts from the WoW and I really wanna read them. I can find Arianne's on his site but the others have been taken down as far as I can tell...anyone know of anywhere there still up some archive or anything?!? His website is a pile of sh*te and I cant figure anything out!!

Sleepy

They're not archived on the site and tend to get rotated a bit... A lot of preview chapters are only ever read by George at conventions etc. rather than actually released. There'a an entire forum dedicated to them on http://asoiaf.westeros.org

bradyle

Thanks! Managed to find a pdf of them in the end though. The last hour in work has not been productive but fun! I really do need to reread the books though. Took me ages to realise the deal with horn victorian has!

Sleepy

I'm not sure how legal that is...

bradyle

I always forget you have to be all legal on this site!

pinkypinky

Not sure I could cope with a full re-read but considering it's likely to be about 5 years before we get Winds of Winter, I'll need a serious recap.

Gbear

pinkypinky wrote: »

Not sure I could cope with a full re-read but considering it's likely to be about 5 years before we get Winds of Winter, I'll need a serious recap.

Once you get into the swing of things half way through book 1 you'll find yourself unable to stop.:)

Aoifums

That was kind of disappointing. I'm not sure what I was expecting but I got really excited when I heard about a sample chapter and then that... Maybe it's just because I don't like Arianne's chapters but I just wasn't happy with that.