[pennydreadful]

He's basically said that if he dies before he finishes the book series, whatever unfolds in the tv show will be the official wrap-up for the story.

I view the books and the show as two very different animals anyway, so it doesn't particularly bother me. They made a hell of a lot of changes in the show - bringing in new characters that weren't in the books, not killing off characters who died in the books, leaving out literally dozens of characters from the books and leaving out numerous sub-plots and storylines entirely, making characters more sympathetic in the tv series than they were in the books, characters who were unattractive in the books are more attractive in the tv series etc.

Ordinarily that kind of departure from the source material would drive me wild, as I'm a dyed-in-the-wool book snob, but I think that if the changes hadn't been made to both streamline the narrative and make the world appealing to the viewer, it wouldn't have nearly the success that it does. Let's be honest, there's a lot of people who had never heard of the books and would never have picked them up if it weren't for the tv series. IMO, the tv series is a rare instance of the adaptation being better than the original novel(s).

GRRM is that interesting animal that I refer to as The Good Bad Writer. He has some very interesting ideas, and a great skill for constructing a unique and detailed world which makes the reader want to know more. Conversely, he does have a tendency to get bogged down in those same details (which results in chapters upon chapters of dragging exposition and set-up), and he falls prey to a great number of tropes which, to be fair, are fairly endemic across the fantasy genre (and are also present in the show). I think that the scope of what he has created has grown to the point that it now works against him and he's lost his way and doesn't know where he's going or what he's doing. The tv show has been able to trim things down and tighten the pacing of the storytelling, which most people would agree does drag significantly in the last two books.

I'm also going to flat-out say that GRRM's sex scenes are just butt-clenchingly ghastly. I think a lot of people glom onto his novels because they're excited that he breaks a lot of the fantasy novel traditions - in particular, his fondness for exploring the horizontal mambo in lurid, sweaty (and often rape-tastic) detail while at the same time using odd, awkward, flowery prose*. Unfortunately, when you get to one of those scenes in a GRRM book (or when he feels the need to throw in a description of how a character's breasts are moving under their clothes in the middle of a paragraph), it throws me right out of the scene and I just feel like I'm reading something written by a dirty old man (and trust me, I've read everything Richard Laymon has ever published, and that guy redefines "shoe-horning squicky personal fantasies into his work"). Ultimately, I'm never 100% sure whether he's writing these scenes in because they're part of his world, or if he's just trying to titillate himself and his readers.

* The author has not yet been spawned who can get away with referring to a character's male member as "The Gift" without resulting in me immediately heaving a jaded sigh, rolling my eyes skyward and reaching for the nearest bottle of absinthe.