So you admit that a 5-year wait would have been understandable but at 6 it magically becomes outrageous (not that we're actually at 6 until October)? That seems a bit arbitrary.



That's the average, so there's people who write a lot more than that (Erikson, Dan Abnett, Sanderson) and people who write a lot less than that. Scott Bakker's daily word target is something like 700 words, which some people think is absurdly low, but that still produces a 400-600 page book every 2-3 years (I believe Guy Kay is somewhere around the same).

When you factor in the fact that A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is more than twice the size of the average Bakker or Kay novel, then the conclusion must be that there's a fair few other fantasy authors out there who are dicking around and showing disrespect to their fans etc.



Are there more experienced genre authors than GRRM out there writing 450,000-word novels at a faster speed than GRRM? Who?

And as I pointed out above, it won't be 'counting' until after October. The wait has been frustratingly long enough without people trying to whack an extra year on top of it for no discernible reason.



I think a writers 'job' is to write the best book they possibly can. Obviously there is no logical automatic correlation between writing speed and quality, but in this specific case with the specific issues that Martin has faced which have been gone into quite publicly and in some depth before, it is clear that simply 'getting on with it' is not the answer, especially since those advocating 'getting on with it' have never, not once in five years of bitching, ever offered any viable solutions to those specific problems that were superior to the conclusions GRRM himself reached after writing through the process.



If this is so, I want to know where those 1,600 manuscript pages that have gone into the book (not mentioning the additional pages that have moved into Book 6) have magically appeared from.



Jordan was diagnosed with amyloidosis during the signing tour for KNIFE OF DREAMS. So he wrote and published exactly zero books after being diagnosed with his illness, since he was undergoing incredibly debilitating treatment for it.

He did, however, put a Herculean amount of effort and energy at a difficult time into providing notes, outlines, dictations, character studies etc for the conclusion of the series to be written by someone else. That is an impressive undertaking given his condition and something that I'm not trying to belittle. Just that the comparison you raise is invalid.