Winter Is Coming (from sticksstonesandherringbones tumblr)
My Advent Thanksgiving series is a series of posts about stuff I liked in 2011. Music, books, tv, games, handsome gentlemen – you get the idea.
Ages after everyone else knew about them, 2011 was the year I started GRR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. My friends had been thrusting them at me for years, but I resisted. I can’t even remember why I demurred at first, but after a while it was a mix of ‘they can’t be that good if everyone else likes them, especially if they liked them before me’, and stubbornness. The same reasons I delayed reading Anne Rice and Jeff Noon and have still not seen The Wire. I would now murder for a new Jeff Noon book and I know I will love The Wire once I get round to watching it. Later.
Anyway, this year the pull of needing to read A Game of Thrones before the TV series started and everyone else read it meant I finally gave in. Yes, while reluctant to be the last to the party when all my friends had already discovered GRRM, I was keen to be able to say I’d already read them when the TV series brought everyone else in. I’m a horrible hipster book snob, who knew?
Three books in and you can call me a convert. I’ll definitely be finishing the series, and I’m glad I missed the years of wait for A Dance With Dragons, the delay that provoked this blog post from a certan Mr Gaiman. My loathing of Sean Bean means I might not watch the TV series, unless I just fast forward the bits with him in.
I’ve left the series for a while, though. I read the first three too fast and the gloom started to prey on me. Winter is Still Coming, and things are just getting worse and worse. Every time I start to like a character something terrible happens to them, usually some kind of brutal death. There’s a turn of events in A Storm of Swords that I fear I may never recover from. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. I read that chapter again and again, certain I had to be wrong. Then I cried – half sad, half angry that GRR had done it to me AGAIN. Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice – your book is going in the freezer where it can’t hurt me any more, a little trick I learned from Joey in Friends.
I’ve not yet finished the draft I thought I’d be done with last month, but I have had some great ‘ping!’s about what this middle section needs. Insights that help change it from ‘and then, after The Beginning, they decide to go Slay The Baddies, uncovering (and solving) a Mystery in the process, which leads nicely to The End‘ to something with more substance – less of a service-station stop en route to the end, more of a village in its own right.