You still haven't answered the question. Why is 5 years the highest amount acceptable? Why not 9 or 4? What process led you to believe that 5 years is that maximum possible amount given the number of SF and Fantasy novels that have taken longer to come out?



Well, we could engage in guesswork and supposition. Or we could, you know, actually check out what Robert Jordan himself said about it on his blog at the time:

http://www.dragonmount.com/forums/blog/4/entry-348-an-idle-comment-or-two/

Jordan felt somewhat ill on Memorial Day 2005 (which was after the manuscript of KoD had been submitted), followed by a recurrence whilst attending a showing of SPAMALOT a week later. He had it looked into and the diagnosis came after KoD had come out.

So Jordan's illness did not manifest any symptoms at all before KoD was completed and handed in.

KNIFE OF DREAMS took longer to write because Jordan took a break after CROSSROADS to write the NEW SPRING novel. And yes, he got slagged off for that massively at the time.



That's because writing is not a mechanical process. Sit down, bash out 2,000 words a day, rinse and repeat until it's done. The only writer I know who comes close to doing that and is any good is Steven Erikson. Everyone else in that bracket - Salvatore, Feist, Anderson, Goodkind - sucks donkey ass.

You're also cherry-picking what points to respond to and ignoring the ones that torpedo your arguments. So I want to know how your argument stacks up against:

1) The specific, major writing, structural and timeline problems that were encountered during the writing of ADWD, some stored up and repeatedly put-off since Martin started writing the series twenty years ago.

2) The fact that ADWD is almost 450,000 words long in manuscript, half again the length of the previous book in the series, 70,000 words longer than any Wheel of Time or Malazan novel, and longer in word-count than LORD OF THE RINGS in its totality, which took twice as long to write.

3) That 2,000 words a day as an average presupposes that 50% of writers will work slower than that and 50% will work faster. And Martin has the misfortune to fall into the lower half of that bracket, along with many, many others.