Have you ever had one of those mornings, the kind where you wake up with a start, stumble through the house, dodging piles of books and strange, sharp-edged children’s toys, into the kitchen where you start making coffee, only to realize (cue ominous chords) THERE ARE NO COFFEE FILTERS!!!  And the scream that comes out of you is something feral and desperate, so loud that it… wakes you up with a start.  And you lay there for a second, shivering, still terrified, but comforted by the fact that it was all just a dream.  So you decide that no more sleep is likely to come and you get up shakily and stumble through the house, dodging piles of books and strange, sharp-edged children’s toys until you get to the kitchen, and you open the drawer where you keep the coffee filters… and there are NONE there!!!!

I can’t decide if I feel more like George R.R. Martin, or like many of his fans, each trapped in their own on-going nightmares from which they can’t seem to awaken.

I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but Martin has become something of an internet whipping boy over the last few months.  The key issue is the fact that he’s… a little behind would be putting it politely… on the latest book in his unimaginably successful A Song Of Ice And Fire series.  “A little behind” to the point that he published the first half of the latest book (that half, for the record, weighed in at a mere 680 pages) five years after the previous book, with vows from both author and publisher that the second half would appear shortly.  Those vows were made in 2005, and there’s been no sign of a new book since.

And the fans are upset.  Well, not all of them.  But a vocal, nay, militant group of Martin readers (let’s refer to them, with editorial non-partisanship, as “fucking idiot overly entitled fanboy wankers”) have been, well, vocal and militant about everything from Martin’s writing process to his other projects to his personal life in their pursuit of the new book…

(Yes, you’re right – I DO have an image of Gollum in my head right now, crouched in a cluttered basement suite, muttering “My precious…” as he strokes a battered paperback of A Game of Thrones… why do you ask?)

The fighting has gotten particularly vitriolic, and it occasionally spills out of the safe confines of Martin’s on-line universe and into the more genteel locales of cyberspace.  Case in point, this recent, well-reasoned, non-confrontational analysis from Neil Gaiman’s blog.  (For the record, I was grateful that I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee — ah, sweet coffee — when I read the first line of his reply, otherwise I’d be replacing this laptop…)