While I agree with the comments with respect to GRRM, I can't let Patrick Rothfuss off the hook.
I started reading the Kingkiller Chronicle with the understanding that he had already finished the books, and would be releasing them each year for three years. Now that he's blown each deadline by a couple years, I'm a lil' salty.
Was I incorrect to infer some light social contract there?
It seems like the general idea for the full story was done, and "The Book" (as he called it) "existed" in a very rough draft, but with each release he's going back, re-editing and re-working them, adding bits here and there, improving the story until it's to the point that he wants it to be. It would make sense to me that, with each book, the ripple of stuff that needs fixing in the story later on needs more and more re-work.
I believe the first two books were released 4 years apart. It seems that that's the cadence for the books. And hey, Auri novella this fall! :D
Did you enjoy reading books 1 and 2? If you need an ending, just assume that after the last book the town got rushed by those stone-spider things and Kvothe died with his tale unfinished. Life is messy that way.
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I can't pretend to speak for Rothfuss, but what he's doing while folks wait for Kingkiller 3 looks pretty familiar to my own experience. I'm in the middle of writing and drawing the last volume of a trilogy of graphic novels. I'm constantly fighting to keep it from expanding into four books because I want to finish it around the end of the year; I have a list of things I need to make happen before the ending can make sense. And a list of things I'd love to take time to explore but a strong desire to not make the last volume twice the size of the first two together. And a very ambitious chopped-up timeline structure going on in the last volume.
And yet I've been spending the last month working on pretty much anything else besides this last book; my brain's been excited about a completely new idea for something I want to do about six years down the line (I already have long-brewing plans for my next story), I've been doing art for a convention, working on some short stories I promised. I have to fight myself tooth and nail to get any progress on this nearly finished story. Working on it involves loading a bunch of state into my head, and distilling it down into what is occasionally some very emotionally draining things to write; it is not an easy task. And every page I finish gets me one page closer to the ultra-complicated pages I'll have to draw for the climax, which in itself is pretty stressful - I'll be glad to draw them, but they'll be a ton of work, and I'm not 100% sure the idea I have will actually work, so I kinda want to just go off and do something... smaller. And simpler.
Imagine you're Patrick Rothfuss... Kingkiller just might be the most popular thing he ever writes. Not to minimize his future potential, but IMO he just somehow began his novel-writing career with an exceptional series. Anyway, he's only got one chance to finish the story and make it everything it can be. You'd want it to be perfect, wouldn't you? I know I would rather wait a bit longer for a fitting end to one of my favorite narratives of all time.
As an aside, I got restless recently and decided to reread the first two books. It really was a different experience the second time around, and I think well worth the time. This is one of those tightly interwoven tales where knowledge of the 'future' brings out details you never could have fully understood the first time around.
Much in the same way visiting a museum is much more useful for understanding the past than visiting your grandma's attic, I think a curated history is much more useful than an accurate history. When someone says a clean history, I think they're saying a well-curated history.
You don't submit your first draft almost anywhere else, why do you think nailed it the first time writing your commits? Sometimes you don't get things right, and rebasing is one of the tools that helps you make sure that the written record of your work is helpful.
Wow! I love this analogy! Allow me to disagree with you inside the premise of your own analogy. Visiting a museum is a much more useful way to understand past world history, but visiting your grandma's attic is a much more useful way to understand the little twists and quirks of your own family. In much the same way, I think a curated history is very nice for open source projects with lots of committers and constant newcomers, while a history that preserves foibles can be more useful for smaller and tighter teams. It is often very enlightening to see the missteps that were taken on the road to the eventual solution to a problem.
Well, that analogy is OK but there is another analogy which comes to mind: keeping track of everything you do may have very useful future side-effects. As any lab researcher will tell you, keeping a strict log of anything you do is the way to both knowledge and reproducibility.
So git history is not necessarily "human history" but "engineering history" and as such, may be much more important than you think and "curating" it may be a mistake.
While I'm not against your proposal per se, the way you call the low-achieving kids "dullards who may never catch up" is a red flag that you don't really understand what puts these kids there in the first place.
This grouping may benefit the geniuses, but the system isn't really holding back the geniuses. They succeed despite the system, not because of it, whereas the system is failing those lagging behind. Implementing this plan on an American school system without addressing the laggards would just be shuffling around the furniture.
I started reading the Kingkiller Chronicle with the understanding that he had already finished the books, and would be releasing them each year for three years. Now that he's blown each deadline by a couple years, I'm a lil' salty.
Was I incorrect to infer some light social contract there?