All this conjecture about season 5 just reinforces to me how lousy book 4 and 5 are.... a decent editor could have eliminated so much filler and combined both together for one book. I'm so lukewarm about book 6 because I just don't care about any of the remaining story arcs anymore.
Im not sure what you mean about conjecture, do you mean the fact people are discussing what they could cut from season 5 demonstrates that it's not important? Maybe, but the TV audience is a lot more fickle than the readers.
[spoiler]GRRM has said that originally there was going to be no AFFC and ADWD. Basically there would have just been a gap and everyone would be a few years older, but he felt there would have been too much backtracking explaining how all of the characters had evolved during the gap.
That's why Im so excited about the 6th book, because it's time for action. Winter has arrived, it's time for the contenders for the iron throne to battle it out, and it's time to sort out the magic and the white walkers.[/spoiler]
I got a book delivered yesterday called "Rogues", which has been put together by GRRM and is a heap of short stories from the fantasy genre from a heap of authors, including GRRM.
GRRM apparently has a book coming out called World of Ice & Fire (this spring) which is basically an appendix for the whole Game of Thrones series, and GRRM's chapter in "Rogues" is from this book.
It's only 30 pages and tells the story of the rogue Daemon Targaryen (back when Targ's were still riding dragons), and while it's interesting to me it's essentially a condensed family history (Im 2/3 the way through) and I swear he's mentioned >50 characters in 20 pages. It would be a pretty good series itself so maybe it was written as a pilot of some sort? It's styled as though written by a maester and translated by GRRM, so it's slightly different from the usual POV format that he writes in; and numerous,conflicting accounts of certain events are referenced.
Anyway Ive been hanging for more content so this was pretty cool. I'll post this in the book thread too,