Well, David Gerrold has done this with his CHTORR series. So has David Brin. Brin in fact said when he started his popular UPLIFT series he would take long breaks to write other books. At the moment it's been ten years since the last UPLIFT book came out (which did not resolve the oustanding storylines) and his current plan is to write some prequels before getting back to the main series. Thirty years and six books after the series began, we still have no idea what the crew of the starship found on the alien wrecks (which is what started the whole saga in the first place), and the author is in no hurry to get there.

It wasn't planned, but Melanie Rawn's CAPITAL'S TOWER trilogy has also taken a ten-year break between the second and third books, and Rawn seems to be extremely hesitant and half-hearted about finishing the series (although there are other reasons for that relating to the death of a family member).



I understand that perfectly, but this is where the rest of the argument starts to look shaky because it is based on the precept that Martin has 1) taken lengthy sabbaticals from writing ADWD to work on other projects, which is not and never has been the case or 2) if the book had come out faster it would not have sucked, which is definitely not the case either.

The whole argument comes down to people wanting a rushed, crappy book rather than a decent one. Especially coming after the mixed-reception AFFC, this seems to be a rather odd thing to want for a fan of the series.