Reader Frustrations

Many of us, I am sure, have our favorite authors and follow their work with veneration and adoration. Ever since I was young, I had a "core" set of authors that I followed. Some of these are Terry Brooks, Dennis L McKiernan, David Eddings, and more recently, George R. R. Martin.

As a reader, I find myself wholly immersed in these fantastic tales, and I come to feel as though I knew the characters and had shared in their adventures. It is no surprise that when some new work comes out, I hastily snatch up a copy and proceed to vigorously devour it whole.

That being said, I find it gallingly frustrating when my beloved authors fail to deliver! There is nothing worse than a novel that fails to live up to its maker's abilities. I have felt this several times recently, in particular with Terry Brooks' new Shannara series, which fuses his Void/Word series with the world of Shannara. As his work has progressed, I found that it became more and more of a "modern" fantasy and less of an epic, classical fantasy in the vein of Tolkien. As such, I have stopped reading his new work altogether, I am sad to say. It is almost as if Mr. Brooks has "normalized" his fantasy world, making it more mundane and accidental rather than mysterious and fantastical.

For those of you who are not familiar with his work, Shannara was a world that always felt real and there were vague allusions to its being Earth in the far, far distant future. The Word/Void series took place in modern day America with magic and mythical creatures, but these fantasy elements were few and far between. Magic existed and so too did the mythical creatures, but they were largely hidden. What Mr. Brooks has recently done in fusing the two worlds together is to confirm and therefore normalize the Shannara world, which for me always seemed so wonderful in its mystery. It is revealed that modern day Earth suffers a nuclear holocaust, which destroys almost all life and magic is born as a mutation.

Isn't it funny how we can have such fierce loyalty to a particular author, or even to a specific sample of that author's work? As readers, we know, of course, that writing a novel takes a great deal of work. We try to be patient and understanding, but I must confess, my patience is at its near end with another one of my favorite authors, George R. R. Martin. The last book he wrote was A Feast for Crows, back in November of 2005. The book is part of his fantastic Song of Ice and Fire series and it ended on such a cliffhanger. It is now November 2008, and he has yet to finish the next book, A Dance of Dragons. No release date has been leaked, and Martin himself has said on his blog that he would post the minute he was finished. On Borders.com, if you search for A Dance of Dragons, the book pops up and a release date of December 2009 is listed. I am not certain whether this is definite or if it is an arbitrary date assigned by the publication company to indicate that the book has a completion deadline. Anyone have any ideas about this? I'm hoping Jay will read this post. If I remember correctly, he has a few friends who are published authors and he might be able to shed some light on this...

Nevertheless, despite my compassion for authors and their craft, I am particularly frustrated with Mr. Martin because it seems as though he is taking on FAR too much, leading, perhaps, to the current circumstances. Three years have passed since Feast for Crows was published, and the author had stated that Feast for Crows and Dance of Dragons were initially going to be one book, but that the story got too large and he had to split it up. It would seem, then, that a large portion of Dance of Dragons had been completed, and many of us fans waited for the next book to come out, thinking that it would follow soon afterwards. We were, and still are, disappointed that the sequel has not yet come out. Mr. Martin has assured his readers that he has been diligently working on his novel, but I suspect he has not been able to direct as much attention to it as he could/should. I say this because in the past three years, Mr. Martin has been EXTRAORDINARILY busy and his attention has been spread quite thin over many projects. He has served as an editor for several fantasy compilations, published a couple other novels (these ones are not part of the Song of Ice and Fire series), attended many fantasy con's all over the world...there is only so much a man can do. I do applaud him for being so involved in the field, but at the same time, he should not spread himself out so thin. I can only speculate, but I imagine this must be VERY tiring.

Mr. Martin--we, your loyal fans, adore you. We love your work, and while we understand that writing a novel is a tremendous amount of work (you, after all, are the published author, not us), this particular fan would ask that you leave more time for yourself in your busy life. Please don't spread your efforts out so thin and take on more than one project at a time. We eagerly await your next Song of Ice and Fire novel, and we are very excited about the prospects of an HBO Song of Ice and Fire mini-series.

Cheers,
Steve