<story><title>Entitlement issues (2009)</title><url>http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>zaphar</author><text>Periodically someone will ask me if I&amp;#x27;ve read any of the Song of Ice and Fire books. My answer is always no.&lt;p&gt;Then I launch into a rant about the Wheel of Time series. I got sucked into that series on book one and chewed through it all the way to book 7. At book seven I had caught up to the author and the fact that he hadn&amp;#x27;t written the next book in the series yet gave me an opportunity to take stock. I realized that the books had been getting less satisfying and more work to read than before. I also realized that Robert Jordan didn&amp;#x27;t know how to finish the series. He hadn&amp;#x27;t met a plot line he didn&amp;#x27;t like. I was sure he would die before Wheel of Time was finished. Right then and there I decided I was done and would no longer give my money to the series or any other series that showed signs of the same problem. 
I totally called the Wheel of Time. Robert Jordan died and they had to bring in Brian Sanderson to finish. Brian definitely knows how to finish. But for me the magic had already gone.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not out of a sense of entititlement. I just don&amp;#x27;t enjoy unfinished stories. It bugs the crap out of me. George R. R. Martin strikes me as an author with different symptoms but a similar problem. I&amp;#x27;m not sure he knows how to finish it. I won&amp;#x27;t spend my money until he proves it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Entitlement issues (2009)</title><url>http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>logfromblammo</author><text>Creative writing is, much like software development, one of those jobs where you need to enter a different kind of mental state to be really productive.  And that state cannot be maintained indefinitely.&lt;p&gt;George R.R. Martin writes big, fat books that are highly multithreaded, as part of a series that is already complex enough that it makes real life seem simple.  If it were a software project, there would already be four or five more developers working on it.  But he&amp;#x27;s trying to punch it out solo.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t expect him to finish, really.  He&amp;#x27;s probably burned out for the second or third time, at least, and is getting too much fan pressure resulting from the television adaptation bump to focus on regenerating the artistic mojo.&lt;p&gt;If you ever read bestselling authors, they&amp;#x27;re always thanking their support people in the dedication or foreword or colophon or wherever.  Most of them only need a few part-time or shared employees, like their editor, agent, and publicist.  Martin probably needs at least one full-time assistant just for indexing and continuity.&lt;p&gt;This is why I like books that say &amp;quot;third book of the Whatever Trilogy&amp;quot; and the other two are right there on the shelf next to it.  It lets me know that the author can finish something, and I don&amp;#x27;t have to wait for it to happen.&lt;p&gt;I did read the first few books in Martin&amp;#x27;s series, but I borrowed those copies.  I don&amp;#x27;t really want to get sucked in and be left hanging like those people who got into Wheel of Time.  With something like this, you never really know if the bus that just pulled away was the last one on the route for the night.  So if you sit on that bench, the next one may never come.</text></comment>