Elio García estimates that he spends up to thirty-five hours a month supervising Westeros.org, the “Song of Ice and Fire” discussion site.
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García is a superfan. His knowledge of Martin’s invented world is so encyclopedic that the author has referred HBO researchers to him when they have questions regarding the production of “Game of Thrones.” Although García’s participation in Westeros.org is voluntary, his involvement with Martin’s work has become semi-professional. He is being paid to consult with licensors creating tie-in merchandise and to write text for a video game based on the series. He and Martin are collaborating on a comprehensive guide to the books, “The World of Ice and Fire.” Martin himself sometimes checks with García when he’s not sure he’s got a detail right. Martin told me, “I’ll write something and e-mail him to ask, ‘Did I ever mention this before?’ And he writes me right back: ‘Yes, on page 17 of Book Four.’ “
The proliferation of plot elements is a major reason that Martin’s writing pace has slowed. “A Song of Ice and Fire” primarily takes place over several years on a continent about the size of South America. Each chapter is narrated in the third person, from the point of view of a single character. The first book had eight major viewpoint characters, but by “A Feast for Crows” the total for the series had grown to seventeen, each in a different location and enmeshed in a complex plot—fighting in wars, journeying through arduous terrain, scheming to steal a throne.
Making sure that the chronologies of the different stories line up has particularly bedevilled Martin. He said, “I have to ask myself, ‘How long is it going to take this character to get from point A to point B by ship? Meanwhile, what’s happened in the other book? If it’s going to take him this long, but in the other book I said that he’d already arrived there, then I’m in trouble. So I have to have him leave earlier.’ That kind of stuff has driven me crazy.” Last year, he wrote on his blog, “I know perfectly well that as soon as ‘Dance’ is published, some of you out there are going to attempt to correlate its chronology with that of ‘A Feast for Crows.’ . . . Well, it may well make your head explode. It did mine. The ‘Dance’ timeline alone is a bitch and a half.”
Martin is in the unusual position of being a writer whose work is attended to even more closely by his readers than by himself. And, as the panorama of “A Song of Ice and Fire” has grown ever more expansive, Martin has become increasingly afraid that he’ll make mistakes. He has already made some tiny ones: “My fans point them out to me. I have a horse that changes sex between books. He was a mare in one book and a stallion in the next, or something like that.” The eyes of one supporting character are described as green in one passage and blue in another. As Martin puts it, “People are analyzing every goddam line in these books, and if I make a mistake they’re going to nail me on it.”
