I don’t watch much TV these days, but I do watch A Game of Thrones. Which I find interesting as a show and as an adaptation. There’s a level of technical interest involved in seeing how the show creators deal with the various difficulties of translating Martin’s novels to the screen. I don’t just mean visually, or in terms of balancing budgets and battle scenes and so forth. I’m thinking structurally, in terms of how the matter of the books is shaped into the form of a TV show.

How do you fit a long novel into two seasons of TV? How will two overlapping novels fit into an episodic format — how many seasons will that take? Interesting things to ponder as I watch the show.

In particular, there’s one character (no spoilers here) whose point-of-view has been given since the start of the show, and who will continue to get screen time for the next little while, whereas in the book it dropped out after the second book to be picked up later (in book five). He didn’t move much over that time in the books. What do you do with that character over the next years for the TV show? Make up new plot? An intriguing challenge, that, and interesting to see how it plays out.