Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin won’t change what he plans to write to finish out his book series, even though some possible endings have already been explored on the HBO television show based on his novels.
Speaking to The Guardian, Martin said that the TV show version had not been “very good” for him, and said the TV endings won’t influence his path on the remaining two novels in the GoT series.
Many fans agree with Martin that the endings on TV weren’t very good. An online petition calling for a rewrite on the final season garnered over a million signees, and at San Diego Comic Con last month, the GoT panel began with a plea for civility, so high were passions running against the TV show’s creators.
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“Of course HBO are going to change the whole thing, “ joked Nikolaj Coster-Waldau during that SDCC panel.
The 70-year-old Martin lamented to The Guardian that the show and his new-found celebrity actually slowed down his writing.
“The very thing that should have speeded me up actually slowed me down. Every day I sat down to write and even if I had a good day … I’d feel terrible because I’d be thinking: ‘My God, I have to finish the book. I’ve only written four pages when I should have written 40.’”
He said he deliberately removed himself from the online complaints and theories about the TV show.
“I took myself out of all that … some of [the theories] are right and some of [the theories] are wrong. They’ll find out when I finish,” he said.
Martin also said the magic of fan interaction has vanished for him.
“I don’t want to go to a party where an unending succession of people want to take selfies with me,” he said. “Because that’s not fun the way it was in the old days. That’s work.”
No longer can Martin indulge himself in something as mundane as shopping.
“I mean, I can’t go into a bookstore any more, and that used to be my favorite thing to do in the world,” he said. “To go in and wander from stack to stack, take down some books, read a little, leave with a big stack of things I’d never heard of when I came in. Now when I go to a bookstore, I get recognized within 10 minutes and there’s a crowd around me. So you gain a lot but you also lose things.”