A funny thing about George RR Martin.

[snarp]

In spite of all the total jerks who think he's great, he really is pretty great.

Comments

[vito_excalibur]

It's so frustrating!

[mikkeneko]

Maybe so, but he's still not as great as he thinks he is.

[inkstone]

Yeah. pretty much this.

[snarp]

This is why I mostly don't read authors I like's blogs; I have no idea whether they are jerks!

Until they create the sorts of incidents that get heavily-blogged. I'm thinking of writing a Chrome plugin that, upon detecting certain names in the proximity of certain phrases - "racefail," "anti-vaccine," and "responded to a negative review on Amazon" - ROT-13s the name so I can't tell who it is.

[mikkeneko]

Honestly? I've never read his blog so I don't know how he conducts himself online. That was an opinion formed almost entirely by reading the books itself. I have indeed read them all, but I almost put them down for good (actually, I almost threw it into a wall) within the first fifty pages of the first one because the prose was so desperately screaming "Pay attention to me! I'm an epic fantasy writer!!"

The prose did smooth itself out later on, and he's a good enough basic storyteller that I was quite hooked, but I never did quite shake the first impression of someone a little desperate to prove his own importance.

[snarp]

The weird thing is that the actual fantasy elements are the parts I find least compelling. He'd might as well just be writing Dorothy Dunnett fanfic, for all I care.

[wintersweet]

I'll never deny that he's a good writer, but the Song of People I Don't Care About Doing Stuff in Endless Segments and Intermittent Short Segments of People I Kinda Liked Having Clear Marked-for-Death Signs on their Foreheads is so, SO not my cup of tea. (Weirdly, everyone who's ever foamishly pushed it on me has been a guy. I've never experienced that with any other series.)