George R.R. Martin's Feelin' Great After The Ending Of 'GOT'

According to fans and critics alike, you'd have to travel far before you'd find someone who didn't think the ending of Game Of Thrones wasn't a hot pile of CG children's corpses. But there is one person who felt a wave of relief after the finale: George R.R. Martin. And it's not just because the bar for his own ending has now been set so low that he could have all the characters die of dysentery and still get praised for dramatically grounded storytelling.

Instead, Martin's relief comes more from the show as a whole coming to an end, which has eased the pressure on him to keep up. Speaking with The Observer, the Song Of Ice And Fire author revealed that if anything, the show had severely slowed down his writing, and not just because of all the sailor hat shopping he had to do for those fancy award parties. Turns out that having a billion-dollar TV show burning through your decades of stories faster than a dragon burns through a shoddy metaphor can be pretty anxiety-inducing. "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." And Martin, a man who gets flustered when too many people recognize him when he visits bookstores, doesn't thrive under deadlines, at one point even fleeing to a Hobbit Hole in Mexico to distance himself from the baying of fans and HBO producers.

So aside from a much more relaxed and confident Martin, what else does the end of Game Of Thrones spell for the end of A Song Of Ice And Fire? Only good things. He's already assured fans that the ending of the show will have no impact on the ending of the books. And while he refuses to talk about the show finale, he did let slip in the interview that he's always preferred his own "big, untidy, expensive first drafts" over the neat and tidy end products Hollywood turns them into. Perhaps it's a veiled promise that the books won't make the same mistake as the show, whose final season was in such a hurry to tie up every loose end that it didn't even bother to wait for winter to come.

And the only thing fans have to do to get their hands on that slow-paced, detailed, and satisfyingly messy conclusion they've been yearning for sooner rather than later is to stop loudly complaining that Martin should hurry up and finish them. So yeah, we're never going to get that ending.

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