I've just finished a stolen draft of book six of George RR Martin's "A Song of Endless Characters" series, A Lack of Edits. The first five books are: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and... I forget the fifth one... A Dance with Draco? A Maiming of Malfoys? Something like that.
This is exactly what I'm talking about when I go mental about the value of professional editing. The first book was great. By the second book, a feeling of dread set in... things were going nowhere, slowly. What had been delightful unpredictably in the first book now revealed itself to be a tiresome formula (find anyone sympathetic? prepare for the horrible maiming, or death, or series of unfortunate events). Dread at the appearance of new characters: please, no, not another point-of-view character to waste 300 pages on! The realization that almost no time is passing, and taking thousands of pages to do it. It's written like an open-ended TV series, which is probably fitting, given his background. So a soap opera, then. It seemed like a lot more at first. And I thought the third book was great, but by the end I'd lost all trust in the author, that he would finish it well or that he would finish it at all. So I haven't gone beyond the third. It's hard for me to stay with an author I no longer trust. Which is a shame, because he's got chops. There are some great characters and some excellent stories. Lock GRRM in a room with a zealous editor wielding a riding crop in one hand, a cattle prod in the other, and instructions to let him out only upon death or upon culling of, say, 1000 pages from the first 3 books and all of the fourth book.
Epic is not about the number of pages or the number of characters. Epic must yield catharsis, not just exhaustion.
An HBO series adaptation of the first book starts this week. From the previews, it looks great, and I will definitely be watching it. But I'm not sure I'll be reading any more.
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