Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

Santa Fe and Hollywood

After the divorce he eventually became a full-time writer, he had time for writing novels as well. In 1982 Martin wrote a novel named Fevre Dream about vampires followed by another horror novel The Armageddon Rag in 1983. He expected it to be a hit, but the opposite happened, it was not selling. As he remembers “it was the worst-selling of all [his] novels and essentially destroyed [his] career as a novelist at the time”.¹⁸ This eventually caused him to search for a career in a movie industry in Hollywood. He started his television career as a story editor for Twilight Zone in 1986 and in 1987 he became an Executive Story Consultant for Beauty and the Beast. Later he worked as a Producer and a Co- Supervising Producer for the same series and he also wrote a pilot for Doorways, which was filmed but never aired. During this era he kept writing, but mostly short stories. He also started dating his current wife and the biggest love of his life, Parris

¹⁷ “Dubuque,“ George Raymond Richard Martin, accessed August 15, 2016, http://georgerrmartin.com/life/dubuque.html.
¹⁸ “Lunch with the FT: George RR Martin.”
McBride. She was living in Portland, Oregon at that time but soon moved to George’s house in Santa Fe. Interestingly they did not married until February 2011. At the beginning of the 1990’s he started to get frustrated with his job in television, mostly because the majority of his work was never brought to people. In an interview for the January Magazine he recalls: “I was creating my own pilots for new shows. I was doing some film scripts for features, some of them adapting my own work, some originals and some adapting other people's work. Nothing ever got made though. It was one of the things that ultimately frustrated me and drove me back to books.”¹⁹ He says books were his first real love and no amount of money he was getting for his job in Hollywood can really counterbalance the feeling when you know your books are read by people. So in 1991 he began to work on A Song
of Ice and Fire, which was supposed to be a trilogy.

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