Forty-Eight days and counting until Game of Thrones fans can return to Westeros with Season Four. Season three was a brutal, brutal gauntlet. I am current on the books and I can perhaps ease your mind when I tell you that things aren’t getting cheerier, but you won’t be stumbling around your house numb and and broken like you were during season three. The seasons have been each following one of the books, more or less, but with the arrival of season 4 we get to an interesting conundrum. 
George RR Martin originally had books four and five as a giant tome that was going to be eyeing the 2000 page mark, but to get a book out and to keep that book under fifty pounds, he essentially split the cast geographically. Book 4: A Feast for Crows tells the stories of the characters in the north at that time; Book 5: A Dance with Dragons tells the stories of those in the south and picks up the whole cast at the end advancing the whole narrative.
That’s not going to work on TV. You can’t have half your cast sit out a season (especially when most of your cast are rapidly growing teens). The writers for seasons four and five will have to integrate the timelines and as Martin has consulted and written for the show since the beginning, I’m sure he’ll walk them through it. It’s an obstacle that’s been in place since the beginning. The more troubling obstacle is that Martin has yet to finish book 6. His writing pace on the series, which was extremely fast for the first three books, has slowed to a glacial crawl. With the gigantic success of the show, if Martin wants to define his own ending to his own series, he’s up against a clock. I guarantee you that if he hasn’t finished his series by the time HBO catches up with him, they’ll do it for him.
Book six (The Winds of Winter) and Book seven (A Dream of Spring) are supposed to bring the epic to a close, but in his latest interviews Martin has started to dissemble a bit, saying there will be as many books to finish the series as necessary. That’s exactly what Robert Jordan told fans as The Wheel of Time series grew to an eventual 15 books (a series that unfortunately Jordan passed away before Brandon Sanderson stepped in to finish it). Martin’s not going to have that kind of time to play with. This is a situation unique in adaptation of material. It’s somewhat comparable to the Harry Potter films as they were still coming out as Rowling wrote the end to her books, but whereas Rowling tightly plotted her books, that’s not Martin’s strength. I’m rooting for him, but as the gap closes and the audience for the show gets bigger and bigger, I’m a growing concerned there’s going to be a creative collision in the all-too-near future.
Killing Time 
Another show I should be watching. I swear there aren’t enough hours in a lifetime. I actually like it when screen adaptations deviate from the source material; I like it when films have their own identity. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Shining. It makes it more enjoyable to experience both the book and the movie. Of course, that does not stand if the film is changed for purely cynical reasons.
You say that Martin is consulting? Maybe it will turn out OK. I have always wondered if Rowling told the filmmakers where Harry Potter was going. If she didn’t, that would explain a lot.
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Rowling was on set the first two films and had script approval on all the others. Sometimes shed have to change things because they’d mess with where the books are going. Martin is so easily distracted that it might be better if he wasn’t involved but he has some kind of producing title and writes one episode a season.
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