So exactly what could you accomplish in 12 years?

[grrrm]

Pesci and I were discussing -- what else? -- the absurd amount of time it has taken GRRM to finish this goddamn series, and one topic that came up was how exactly our lives have changed since the release of AGOT.   Now Pesci, he somehow managed to graduate college, get himself married, and have like three kids since AGOT came out.  As for me, well, I got to graduate college, hop through a bunch of crappy jobs, buy a house, get two master's degrees, and...well, you get the point.  Or maybe you don't.  In fact, I'm not really sure what the point is, except maybe to say that you can get a lot fucking done in just a few years, and finishing a book that was already mostly written shouldn't be a difficult task to accomplish.

Or, maybe for some perspective, think about it this way: in the time that it has taken this man to write 3.5 fantasy novels, here are a few events that have taken place:

• New planet discovered
• Three presidential terms
• A complete sequencing of the human genome
• The entire Iraq War
• The Internet.  Like, literally, the entire Internet as we know it was created.  (Anyone remember using Mosaic?)

And that's just a few things!  Now, in the time we have been waiting for ADWD alone, you could count, say, Katrina, the reclassification of Pluto, the iPhone...oh, and while I still haven't read a single one, I'll give a shout out to JK Rowling for starting and finishing the entire Harry Potter series (that's seven books, mind you) in the same amount of time it took GRRM to put out 2 good books, one okay book, and one crappy book.

So how has your life changed while you've been waiting?

Side note: thanks to Wotmania for giving us a derisive shout-out on their links page.  They don't seem to like us much, and they aren't fed up fans like we are, but the support helps nonetheless.