Wednesday, 27 April 2011

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS completed

George R.R. Martin and his wife Parris were in New York yesterday to attend the TIME Magazine 'Most Important 100 People' dinner. It also appears that GRRM took advantage of the visit to drop by Bantam HQ and drop off a fairly substantial package on his editor's desk.


So, eleven years to the week after A Storm of Swords was delivered and almost six years to the month after A Feast for Crows was submitted, A Dance with Dragons is done and dusted. It's off to the editor for a final polish and then the production process will step into high gear to get the book onto shelves on 12 July.

Of course, this wouldn't be ADWD if there wasn't some controversy. After promising that the completion announcement would be unambiguous, erm, it was fairly ambiguous if you've never seen King Kong, or if you didn't know that GRRM has been calling the book 'Kong' for a good two years now.

Let's hope The Winds of Winter has a smoother ride, though I can't really imagine it being possible for a book to have a rougher one.

UPDATE: From George's editor:

There were a few moments of George in a spare office yesterday, cleaning up the last bits and inserting a few new bits in longhand, while I typed the changes into the electronic files, but we are honestly and officially done.

And there is MUCH rejoicing!

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9 comments:

  1. Anonymous27 April 2011 at 18:54:00 GMT

    I love that for years his site has said that Parris and his publishers would be the first to know, then immediately after he would update a particular section of the site. It didn't go down that way at all BUT... I'm quibbling, quibbling, quibbling, I know this. All told, it's a joyous day.

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  2. Chris M27 April 2011 at 22:15:00 GMT

    That's awesome. Can't wait to read it in July.

    And just in time for your site to nearly hit 1 million hits. :)

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  3. Unknown27 April 2011 at 23:20:00 GMT

    I think GRRM lost his focus for a while with other projects and now that aGoT has hit HBO he will devote more time and attention to the next installment. I certainly hope that is the case.

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  4. Adam Whitehead27 April 2011 at 23:40:00 GMT

    Ha, the statcounter counts visits from a fairly arbritrary point (the blog was going for 18 months before I installed it) and I set it to count 'site visits' rather than 'hits'. I'm not sure why now. Interestingly the 'hits' have just gone over 1.5 million in the last few days.

    Shame I don't get any benefits from the high hit rate other than feeling good about it :-)

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  5. Brett27 April 2011 at 23:47:00 GMT

    Good news.

    I hope that Winds of Winter will be out faster, if only because GRRM won't have the huge "failed time-skip" monkey on his back (like he did for AFFC and ADWD).

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  6. Elfy28 April 2011 at 03:11:00 GMT

    The buzz around the HBO show wouldn't have anything to do with pushing your hit count up, would it?
    Good news about ADwD and in true George fashion he managed to make the announcement into a minor controversy.

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  7. BAndy28 April 2011 at 15:01:00 GMT

    wertquote: Shame I don't get any benefits from the high hit rate other than feeling good about it :-)

    that is easy to solve:
    Get your own site, move everything here over to it, and make some money on advertising. duh!

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  8. Jebus28 April 2011 at 23:40:00 GMT

    Yeah dude, get some _small_ advertising on the site and make a little bit of dosh at least.

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  9. Adam Whitehead29 April 2011 at 00:41:00 GMT

    I talked to Pat a while ago about how much he makes with his vastly superior hit rates, and it was about $20 a year in return for getting the Sidebar Adverts From Hades. So yeah, it's not really worth it :-)

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