Game of Thrones Bookreader Thread: ***TV SPOILERS ITT***

[...] He had “material for 100 other shows,” he said, but HBO executives weren’t yet interested in doing spinoffs. Martin didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder in Hollywood. He hoped his fantasy creation would evolve into a franchise that kept it alive for generations.

[...] “I sold Westeros to Warner Bros. in 2007,” he points out.

[...] “I have to finish the next book,” Martin fretted. “The actual writing [is getting] harder. I’m rewriting. I’m struggling. Maybe I’m overoptimistic about how quickly I can write these things. I’m trying to cut back on anything that I can to clear my decks and get this done …”

[...] In many ways, Martin looks the same as ever. He’s sharp and engaging. His voice is vibrant. Yet his beard has thinned and he has a tougher time walking. He’s also lost weight, but contrary to morbid online speculation, this isn’t due to any health issues.

“I never thought I’d live to be 77,” Martin says. “I’m old, so I have some old-people stuff. My lower back hurts sometimes. I don’t like to stand around. But I feel OK. Maybe you should make that your headline: ‘George R.R. Martin Is Not Dying.'”

[...] But one idea is an offspring of the most intriguing of all the post-Thrones pitches — the scrapped Jon Snow sequel. Martin long has resisted sequels to Thrones because the ending of his Ice and Fire books is not going to align with the show and he wants to avoid further canonizing Thrones‘ controversial ending — even though he hasn’t written his own yet. “[The book’s ending is] going to be significantly different,” Martin says. “Some characters who are alive in my book are going to be dead in the show, and vice versa.” [...] Harington, working with two writers from his drama series Gunpowder, was interested in mapping out a tale of Snow living alone as a broken man with PTSD. Having chased off his direwolf Ghost and thrown away his sword Longclaw, Jon spent his time building cabins and burning them back down again. Harington also wanted Jon to die and to avoid being a hero. [...] HBO found the “broken Jon Snow” idea too much of a bummer and eventually pushed it aside. Yet in recent days, sources say a new writer (Quoc Dang Tran from Drops of God) has come aboard to revive the sequel idea. While the story is still being fleshed out, one possibility is shifting the drama to the Mediterranean-like land of Essos and adding another hugely popular legacy character — Arya Stark (who was played by Maisie Williams in Thrones). This is very early development, however, and HBO is naturally being quite cautious about handling this one.

[...] “I have an ego,” Martin once said.

Having interviewed Martin nearly a dozen times over the years, this quote always stuck with me because nearly all creatives have an ego — often massive ones — but they’re rarely so forthright about it. Whereas Martin always comes across bluntly honest and unafraid to be vulnerable. He can also get a very frustrated at perceived rudeness or slights. Warner Bros. may legally own Westeros, but the world is still Martin’s creation, and he understandably wants to feel respected and involved.

Martin has made something else consistently clear: He believes book adaptations — not just his own — should be as faithful as possible. Martin is childless and has said he considers his characters to be his children. If another writer wants to make a major change to one of his brood — or remove one from a story altogether — he wants to know why, and the reason should make sense.

Knight showrunner Parker says he suspects Martin leaning on HBO and showrunners to respect his vision is one reason “why these shows have done so well” and that the author has “been nothing but a benefit.”

“In my very first meeting with George, before I officially had the job, I promised I wouldn’t put anything in that he didn’t want — but it’s never come to that,” Parker says. “He’s pushed back on a lot of things. I just explain the reason why I want to do something and then he would explain his reasons why I’m an idiot.”

It’s always been a bit unclear precisely how much authority Martin has over his HBO projects (sometimes it seems fuzzy to Martin, as well). When HBO’s Orsi is asked about Martin’s level of control, she replies, “We always value his input in terms of the writers we’re hiring, the arenas we’re tackling for new spinoffs and the development of each project across the GoT universe. But building, producing, and running a series is a massive undertaking. We while we care deeply about George’s and our showrunners’ perspectives, we ultimately make decisions that make the best show.”

I ask Martin carefully: I know you can’t say much about this, but I was wondering how your relationship with Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal got so rocky?

“It’s worse than rocky,” Martin says, looking miserable. “It’s abysmal.”

Without getting into spoilers, Martin’s gripes about Dragon stem from disputes over changes to his book’s characters that impact key plot points.

“I hired Ryan,” Martin says. “I thought Ryan and I were partners. And we were all through the first season. I would read early drafts of the scripts. I would give notes. He would change some things. It was working really well — I thought.”

[...] “Then we got into season two, and he basically stopped listening to me,” Martin says. “I would give notes, and nothing would happen. Sometimes he would explain why he wasn’t doing it. Other times, he would tell me, ‘Oh, OK, yeah, I’ll think about that.’ It got worse and worse, and I began to get more and more annoyed. Finally, it got to a point where I was told by HBO that I should submit all my notes to them and they would give Ryan our combined notes.”

One night in 2024, while the second season was airing, Martin wrote a blog post, “Beware the Butterflies,” which publicly revealed some of his gripes. When he woke the next morning, it was as if Martin had unleashed his own Red Wedding. An upset HBO exec had called Martin’s manager, who phoned Martin’s assistant, who took down the post — but not before entertainment sites (including THR) picked up Martin’s comments. “I would’ve put it back up, but then I would’ve looked like an idiot,” he says. “And 80 percent of it was praise, but that’s not what people focused on.”

Still, the post was meant to be just part one of six detailing the author’s issues with Dragon.

Martin says he can’t say anything beyond this. But sources say Martin and Condal’s relationship deteriorated further and came to a head during a Zoom call with the show’s producers and some HBO executives. The purpose of the call was for Condal to present his vision for season three. After Condal spoke, Martin detailed his many objections and allegedly declared, “This is not my story any longer.”

Condal didn’t comment for this profile but pointed to a statement he gave to EW last year: “I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. … But at some point, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way .. I just have to keep marching forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that’s my job … I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday.”

After their contentious Zoom call, HBO asked Martin to step back from Dragon altogether. A few months later, the author was brought back aboard. “I can’t talk about it,” Martin says.

“George and Ryan had a disagreement on the direction of season three,” an HBO insider says. “At that point, it was clear that the process and communication with them was broken and needed a reset. So there was naturally a period where everyone took a step back for a while until we could figure out a new way forward.”

In August, Martin was on an author panel at WorldCon when a fan asked a stunningly rude question. Martin typically enjoys such events. He likes communing with fellow creatives and meeting fans. He’ll do book signings for hours, autographing a thousand copies. Martin notes fans are always exceedingly nice when he meets them in person.

The WorldCon panel was taking audience questions when somebody asked Martin if he would let another writer finish The Winds of Winter because “you’re not going to be around for much longer.”

The audience booed. Martin felt like he’d been slapped. When he looked online to see the reaction, he was dismayed to find some fans saying he deserved it. “They say, ‘He lied to us, he is going to die soon, look how old he is,’ ” Martin says. Even now, months later, the author looks rattled. “I really didn’t need that ****,” he says. “Nobody needs that ****.”

Martin recently has endured losing a wave of fellow novelists whom he counted as close friends. “Howard Waldrop, Gardner Dozois, Victor Milán, John J. Miller, Edward Bryant …” Martin lists. “They’re all gone, one after another.”

Last year, Martin sat down with one of his idols, Robert Redford, who was a fellow executive producer on Dark Winds. Redford came out of acting retirement to film a brief cameo in the show with Martin. In the scene, the two are sitting at a chessboard, and Redford ad-libbed a line: “George, the whole world is waiting, make a move.” It was a meta joke about how long it’s taken Martin to finish Winter. Then Redford died, too. His chess scene with Martin — like something out of The Seventh Seal — was his final performance. “Which just seems so ****ing weird,” Martin says.

Martin’s masterpiece is arguably A Storm of Swords. The book, published in 2000, was adapted into seasons three and four of Thrones. It’s a brilliant, twisty novel, spanning more than 1,000 pages and reads like Martin was channeling a river of fire. Somehow, Martin wrote Swords in a single year. Winter has taken him 14 and counting. “I look back at that book too,” Martin admits. “And I don’t know how I did it.”

Martin says he has around 1,100 manuscript pages finished. He’s also said the number for a while. He long has blamed the endless distractions that have come from shifting from a full-time author to a producer and celebrity. The success of Thrones was both the best thing that could have happened to Martin and the worst thing that could have happened to the greatest story he ever wrote.

[...] Here’s what happens when he sits down to write: “I will open the last chapter I was working on and I’ll say, ‘Oh ****, this is not very good.’ And I’ll go in and I’ll rewrite it. Or I’ll decide, ‘This Tyrion chapter is not coming along, let me write a Jon Snow chapter.’ If I’m not interrupted though, what happens — at least in the past — is sooner or later, I do get into it.”

One issue is narrative complexity. The fourth Ice and Fire book, A Feast for Crows, introduced several new characters and major storylines to an already highly intricate tale. Martin was soon switching perspectives between 21 rival viewpoint characters, each with their own dedicated series of chapters. (When Thrones reached the same narrative juncture, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss decided to largely stick with characters who were already established — yet still famously struggled to pull off a final stretch that fans felt was satisfying).

When the pandemic hit, Martin tried going to a literal cabin in the woods to finish Winter. That was a prolific stretch, he says, resulting in many new chapters. But it took him away from his longtime partner, Parris McBride (they met in the 1970s and tied the knot in 2011), and even Martin’s forced-isolation effort ran into creative troubles. “I wrote a Tyrion chapter I just loved,” he recalls. “Then I looked at it and said: ‘I can’t do this, it will change the whole book. I’ll make this into a series of dreams. No! That doesn’t work either …'”

I ask Martin if he’s ever considered simply giving up on the book. It’s your life, George, I say. You don’t have to spend it working on something if you find it torturous.

“I would hate that,” Martin says. “It would feel like a total failure to me. I want to finish.”

Handing the project to another writer — which some fans have lobbied for him to do — isn’t going to happen, Martin says. There is also no secret contingency plan for somebody else to take over if Martin gets struck by lightning. “If that happens, my work won’t be finished,” he says. “It’ll be like The Mystery of Edwin Drood” — referring to Charles Dickens’ unfinished final novel.

How much further does he have to go? Martin is vague. “If I wound up doing everything in my head, this could be the longest book in the series.”

After asking Martin repeatedly about Winds — seemingly more than he’d like — the author did what he does best. He tells a story.

In 1975, Martin met Dune author Frank Herbert at a book convention and they shared a drink. The meeting was “near the end of Herbert’s life,” Martin says. Herbert had written many acclaimed novels, but all fans seemed to want was more Dune. Herbert’s publisher had just offered him a modest advance for a story he wanted to write, or six times that number for another Dune novel.

“He didn’t like Dune anymore and he didn’t want to write any more Dune books,” Martin says. “But he felt locked in by the success of Dune, so he kept writing them.”

Martin finishes … and waits.

I ask: Do you relate to how Herbert felt?

“I’m not necessarily tired of the world [of Ice and Fire],” he says. “I love the world and the world-building. But, yes, I do.”

[...] Martin’s thoughts turn, unprompted, to the end of Ice and Fire. It becomes clear that the details of his story’s conclusion, like so much of the saga, remains uncertain.

“I was going to kill more people,” he muses. “Not the ones they killed [in the show]. They made it more of a happy ending. I don’t see a happy ending for Tyrion. His whole arc has been tragic from the first. I was going to have Sansa die, but she’s been so appealing in the show, maybe I’ll let her live …”

His assistant’s car is coming. I ask what he’s doing for Christmas.

“I don’t know,” Martin says. “I think I’ll stay home. I have to write more Dunk and Egg. There’s supposed to be another Fire and Blood book, too. I do think if I can just get some of these other things off my back, I could finish The Winds of Winter pretty soon. It’s been made clear to me that Winds is the priority, but … I don’t know. Sometimes I’m not in the mood for that.”

He sighs. “I’m so far behind on everything.”