rjsilverthorn posted...
You are probably better off for it. Started off with great world building but he definitely hit a point where he was just dragging it out by introducing new characters and plotlines.
"Holy shit, I am making so much money on these books. I'd better pad them out as long as I can so the gravy train never ends!"
It's basically the George RR Martin model, where a planned trilogy became five, then became seven. the more books you can squeeze out, the more money you make. Just keep adding characters and never get to the actual payoff. And then you die before finishing it.
The main difference is that Robert Jordan managed to turn his original "trilogy" into 14 books (and arranged for someone else to finish it after he was dead). Whereas George RR Martin never has to finish his because he tricked HBO into paying him metric shit-tons of money for the brand, which works out for him since he hates both the series and fans.
The only way we ever see A Song of Ice and Fire get completed is if Martin goes bankrupt and suddenly needs cash. He'll spontaneously find his crippling writer's block dry up PDQ and get a manuscript out pronto. Sadly, the odds of that happening are slim. Because he has made
so goddamn much money
off of it.
Though neither of them hold a candle to Piers Anthony when it comes to spinning straw into gold from what was originally mean to be a trilogy. The Xanth "trilogy" is currently somewhere around 48 books.