By George!

Why is A Dance With Dragons taking so long if it's already been written? —Melody Auvinen
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN:This is a common misconception. Parts of A Dance With Dragons were finished in 2005, when I finished [the previous book in the series] A Feast for Crows. It's not like I had two complete books. I had one complete book, and one that was partially written. And I made an estimate as to how to long it was going to take me to translate that partial book into a full one, and it was a woefully optimistic guess. [Laughs] What can I say? It's taken a lot longer.

Why do you find it so easy to kill off your main characters? —Brian H.
It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it. If I was a soldier going to war, I'd be pretty scared the night before a battle. It's a scary thing. And I want my readers to feel that fear as they turn the page. I want them to feel that no one is safe — that if my character is surrounded by three people with swords, he's in serious trouble, because he's only one guy against three. It's a great way to show that you're not writing this cartoon adventure where the hero is going to slay 20 men at once with his brilliant swordsmanship and go through unscathed while making wisecracks all the way.

In the Song of Ice and Fire series, for which character's death did you get the most flack from readers? —Emily
The scene that was hardest to write was the wedding scene in Book III. That was the most violent and difficult. And I've gotten a lot of mail from readers, many of them saying it was brilliant, but others saying they couldn't read past that, and they were giving up on my book, it was too painful. But it's supposed to be painful. It was painful to write, it should be painful to read, it should be a scene that rips your heart out, and fills you with terror and grief. That's what I'm striving for.

NEXT PAGE: ''What's going on with HBO turning Song of Ice and Fire into a TV series?''