Not A Blog Updates

Well to be fair, my life back then was a lot more hectic and busy than it is now and I was a first-time reader so I wasn't that heavily invested in the series yet. I was pregnant and a brand new Mom at the time so you can imagine I didn't actually have a lot of quality reading time. I remember trying to read it and falling asleep with a baby in my arms half the time. That "baby" is now all grown up and a Game of Thrones fan himself, even got a Stark stylized wolf tattoo.   Then years passed before I picked the series up again - we were stationed overseas and I saw three books on display (2000) in the military exchange and hadn't even realized I'd missed one so I spent some good months catching up! I really thought his next one would be sooner since I had not been following them that much and missed ACOK entirely somehow being busy with life. Again, I just sort of put it out of my mind for years - it's not hard when it didn't have a huge following like it does now in mass media because of the show ... so don't feel too bad for most of us old fogies, we didn't even have the internet available that easily when those first couple of books were done anyways. There were few fansites or whatnot back then (LOL I sound like I'm talking about the frontier days or something)...


So anyways ... fast forward to that 2000-2005 waiting period. That's when things started getting interesting for me as a fan. I was helping internal testing and feature character writing for a game called Shadowbane which started into beta testing around that time after I finished Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords consecutively. The game was trying to develop Game of Thrones type banner systems where houses could declare and swear to others and simple alliances could become nations and numerous guilds could band together to either support or take down player built cities, etc etc... and we used a lot of the same style artwork for the shields and symbols, etc. The game wasn't wildly popular when it released and died away after a few years of free-to-play, but it did lead the way in new ideas for MMO guild alliance style play, player built cities and warfare that other games since then (2006) have adopted. 

Much of my writing and gameplay back then was influenced heavily by Ice and Fire characters, noble houses and legends. Those were the days when players still roleplayed their characters quite a bit. You really have to search these days for niche games and communities that still do. 

And so the wait between books really stretched for me from about 2002 (during the Shadowbane development period) until 2005 for AFFC release, which was the first book I bought right when it was published, and then of course another long wait from then until ADWD in 2011. But really, it didn't seem like that long back then because again, there was no show egging on the story yet and I didn't follow fansites and all that much online. Time flies when you're not watching the hands of the clock, you know?

And that's my whole fan history for the series up to when the show started. That just really fanned the flames for fan hysteria. I don't think George really had any idea it was going to blast off into orbit at that point and the pressure would become so great. Up to 2011 he had been writing the books as leisurely as he wanted and there weren't millions of people yammering about how slow he did it online. HBO did that one.

I have this solution to GRRM's pace of writing ASoIaF , I read other books.

They EXIST???

Update: Mr. Martin working hard and fast on tWoW

grrm.livejournal.com/437368.html

Depends entirely on what you consider hard work.

Hey, around this time of year, all we have to do as a fandom is bitch or speculate. Bitching makes the world go round.

Weeell - if you follow his NAB on a regular basis, you´ll notice that his summer runs for almost 9 months per year, only interrupted by the NFL season. And that´s been going on for years.  NAB is the *Groundhog Day* version of genre-writer blogs.

He is my bitch.






Kind of...

Just don't tell him I said that.