Fans have been waiting over a decade for Patrick Rothfuss to publish The Doors of Stone, the third and final book in his beloved Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy. At this point, enough has been said about the wait, which can be likened to the one for The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. When will these books come out? We have no idea.
However, Martin has at least released a good number of sample chapters from The Winds of Winter while fans wait. Rothfuss, meanwhile, has read the prologue to The Doors of Stone. He also promised to release a full chapter from the book after fans met a stretch goal while he was raising money on stream for his Worldbuilders charity. It was not intended to follow Kvothe, but rather be a self-contained story within the narrative. Thus far, the chapter has not materialized.
While addressing eager readers on his Twitch page, Rothfuss opened up on the status of the chapter. “I feel really bad about the chapter,” he said.
Patrick Rothfuss breaks silence on missing Doors of Stone charity chapter
Instead of throwing a “wad of text” onto his blog, Rothfuss wanted to do “something fun” with the release of the chapter; a while back he mentioned calling in favors to record an audio version of the chapter with a bunch of different voice actors. Ultimately, this complicated things:
"It got complicated and it got hard and various fires in my life which meant I couldn’t keep it going, couldn’t put a bow on it, and I feel bad about it."
At this point, so much time has passed that he’s moved on to re-editing the chapter in question. “I’d like to do it sooner rather than later but now after all this time, and I’ve half re-edited that chapter, do I stop re-editing it?” he asked. “Or do I push through on the editing which turned out to be harder than I thought, or I just go back to the old version and barf it onto the blog?”
No doubt Rothfuss’ perfectionist instincts are getting in the way. And while it’s not great to miss a deadline by this long a stretch, especially when people have already paid money toward seeing this chapter, he’s clearly got a lot going on.
We are still getting some Kingkiller content this year. In November, Rothfuss will publish The Narrow Road Between Desires, a novella all about Bast. The book is due out on November 14 and is available for pre-order now!
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h/t Daniel Greene