'Vast majority' is certainly untrue. And it is certainly a far more widespread, if equally factually untrue, view that Robert Jordan expanded his series out for financial gain and took the mickey out of readers who constantly turned up every two years to buy an expensive new hardcover, only to find that in 800 pages the story had progressed slightly less far than a snail with asthma (reaching its nadir with CROSSROADS OF TWILIGHT).

Arguing about public perception is a fool's errand because it gets you nowhere. Regardless of 'what people think' (as evidenced by looking at uninformed Amazon comment pages), we here know that RJ simply lost control of the story and its pacing and it took a long time to drag it back on course, but eventually he succeeded (as shown by KoD and his planning for AMoL, as now executed by Sanderson) and we also know that GRRM has worked constantly on ADWD since 2005 and had enormous structural and timeline problems with the book and making it all make sense.



That said, agreed on this. GRRM is not the best at PR and has definitely, during the ADWD years, become inconsistent in his communications. He kept up occasional updates during the writing of AFFC (two or three big updates about the book per year) that seemed to keep the readers much happier. During the writing of ADWD he's gone very long periods without talking about the book at all, giving the impression, however false, that the book has not been a high priority. This isn't helped by some fans moaning about him talking about the book and demanding that he shuts up about it until it's finished, and others demanding the precise opposite.

Frankly, I think GRRM made a mistake in enabling comments on his LJ, as ever since then his communication over ADWD has become somewhat coloured by the responses on there.



Possibly. Although, as has been said many times before, many other books have taken longer than five years to write (including A GAME OF THRONES - sort of - and THE EYE OF THE WORLD for that matter) and turned out well, whilst other books have taken six months to write and turned out utter crap (see Raymond E. Feist's recent work). There is no magic formula or easy correlation here, which I think is adding to the frustration.