Dance with Dragons release date?

[Werthead]

The fourth book was to be published but wasn't becuase of it's size

Sort of true. The fourth book wasn't finished when the split happened though, which is where part of the problem comes from.

GRRM decided to split the book in half, gathering the POVs we find in AFFC into one and having the remainder in the next (ADWD)

Again, that was the original plan. He had 1600 manuscript pages for AFFC when he split the book. 1100 went into the published book (1100 MS pages = 800 normal hardcover pages at the size and font the publishers were using) and 500 were kept back for ADWD.

GRRM decided to mess with ADWD. ther's no other way to put it. I wish he had just left the other half alone and let it be published. i can't imagine that it wouldn't have been worthy of him.

You are definitely wrong here. First off, ADWD wasn't complete at that point. To make the book the same size as AFFC, he needed to write another 600 MS pages, otherwise Book 5 of ASoIaF would have been only about 350-400 pages long and not much would have happened in it. It would have been covering the other half of the 'gap' in the narrative that AFFC was introduced to fill in but with characters who weren't really doing much during that time. Simply releasing what he had was not an option. As he wrote those new pages (and ADWD is apparently somewhat longer than the 1100 MS pages originally planned, maybe 1300 pages - about the same size as ACoK - or maybe even longer) he needed to go back and change the 500 MS pages he already had ready to bring them in line with the new material he was writing. In the end, it appears that the majority of these pages have now been substantially rewritten, meaning the value of having them in hand when the AFFC was published disappeared. In essence he has had to write a whole new book from scratch, and taking 3.5 years to do that is in line with the writing time of the rest of the series, ASoS excepted.

In addition, we have now had the benefit of seeing (or hearing) some of those chapters at the time and the new, rewritten versions more recently. The rewritten versions are considerably better.

ADWD was set to be published last year, indicating that it just needed some minor touching up, closure, whatever, and then it wasn't being published.

Like I said before, this wasn't the case. The book needed substantially more work than that, and GRRM said so at the time (he still needed to write more than half a book, and it had just taken hime 3.5 years to write the last one). As for the getting it out in a year thing, as he has said himself many times, he is prone to over-optimism. This is an additional reason why the updates on the progress of the book have dried up.

Shawn Speakman on Suvudu has a great article on the situation here, and, apologies if this is bad form, but I have addressed the same point here and examine here in depth exactly what the writing difficulties have been in completing ADWD, a book that has existed in, at last count, at least three different variations over the years.

[Clansman]

Thanks for the very concise history, Werthead. As much as we love this series, we would all be disappointed (we might even feel betrayed!) if GRRM rushed the process and came out with something beneath the quality of the other books.

I have been as impatient as anyone, but, in an effort to apologize for my impatience, let me say that there are lots of good books to read from other authors in the meantime. I'll never have the time I need to read everything I want. I know I will set aside just about anything when ADWD is released, with only one notable exception (Initiate's Trial, by Janny Wurts).

So let us not bother tickling this thread until there is a real update from GRRM himself. If his muse is being difficult, give the man a break and let him find it. I am not interested in getting a half-baked piece of junk in the place of the great piece of literature I have come to expect from GRRM.