The story isn’t over for “Game of Thrones” fans.
Author George RR Martin has big plans for the final chapters of his seminal book series — and he claims the controversial finale written by DB Weiss and David Benioff “doesn’t change anything at all” in terms of how he plans to wrap up the legend of Westeros.
“You can’t please everybody, so you’ve got to please yourself,” he told The Observer. “There were a couple of years where, if I could have finished the book, I could have stayed ahead of the show for another couple of years, and the stress was enormous.”
The HBO series ending has been “freeing” for him and “very good” for his work.
“I don’t think [the TV series] was very good for me,” he said. “The very thing that should have speeded me up actually slowed me down. Every day I sat down to write and even if I had a good day … I’d feel terrible because I’d be thinking: ‘My God, I have to finish the book. I’ve only written four pages when I should have written 40.'”
Don’t think he’s letting readers in on any of that right now, or indulging the many “GoT” theorists online.
“I took myself out of all that,” he said. “Some of [the theories] are right and some of [the theories] are wrong. They’ll find out when I finish.”
Martin admits it’s not just the fan frenzy on social media that turns him off. While he spoke affectionately of meeting readers, he went on to lament that it’s hard for him to enjoy large fan gatherings the way he used to.
“I don’t want to go to a party where an unending succession of people want to take selfies with me,” he said. “Because that’s not fun the way it was in the old days. That’s work.”
In fact, it’s hard for him to be in public at all these days.
He continued, “I can’t go into a bookstore any more, and that used to be my favorite thing to do in the world. To go in and wander from stack to stack, take down some books, read a little, leave with a big stack of things I’d never heard of when I came in. Now when I go to a bookstore, I get recognized within 10 minutes and there’s a crowd around me. So you gain a lot but you also lose things.”