A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin has said he's written 1,100 pages of next book The Winds of Winter, the same amount he'd written as of December 2022, while also revealing there are eight Game of Thrones spin-off shows being worked on.
People that don’t think very deeply about it will just equate page count to a progress meter
Exactly!
I’ve seen a good number of comments over time where people said things to the effect of “he’s already written 1,000 pages and says he has 200 pages left to write; 1,000 pages took him 5 years, so the other 200 pages will take him one more year”. I’m making up the numbers but this is the kind of math people do.
But Martin edits and rewrites, and occasionally discards large already-written chunks, like a madman. If you’d plot his page count it wouldn’t be a steadily rising graph, sometimes steeper, sometimes less so, rather it would look like a stock chart going up and down.
Exactly!
I’ve seen a good number of comments over time where people said things to the effect of “he’s already written 1,000 pages and says he has 200 pages left to write; 1,000 pages took him 5 years, so the other 200 pages will take him one more year”. I’m making up the numbers but this is the kind of math people do.
But Martin edits and rewrites, and occasionally discards large already-written chunks, like a madman. If you’d plot his page count it wouldn’t be a steadily rising graph, sometimes steeper, sometimes less so, rather it would look like a stock chart going up and down.