To me this seems a bit dramatic – if I had kids and grandkids, I’d think they’d still bring me joy even with the pain I’d feel for what I had lost. Thoughts?

Would have been impractical. This grandchildren would have had children of their own, and then those children would have children. They would have been a constant chain to the world for Arwen, who would likely have outlived them all and suffered the same grief everytime one of them died. A torture.

He bond is her love for Aragorn. Once he left, she would wish to follow him, that is her choce. Not to say she didn't feel for here children, but she would also have faith that as she would follow Aragorn, they would follow her.

When writing a series of books, like [George RR] Martin is with "A Song of Ice and Fire" what responsibility does he have to finish the story? Is it unrealistic to think that by not writing the next chapter Martin is letting me down, even though if and when the book gets written is completely up to him?

[question to Neil Gaiman from 'Gareth']

Yes, it's unrealistic of you to think George is "letting you down".

Look, this may not be palatable, Gareth, and I keep trying to come up with a better way to put it, but the simplicity of things, at least from my perspective is this:

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now.

People are not machines. Writers and artists aren't machines.

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

It seems to me that the biggest problem with series books is that either readers complain that the books used to be good but that somewhere in the effort to get out a book every year the quality has fallen off, or they complain that the books, although maintaining quality, aren't coming out on time.

Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a series, and make me even gladder that the decade that I did write series things, in Sandman, I was young, driven, a borderline workaholic, and very fortunate. (and even then, towards the end, I was taking five weeks to write a monthly comic, with all the knock-on problems in deadlines that you would expect from that).

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

Neil Gaiman's online Journal
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/...itlement-issues.html

"What Tolkien wanted to concentrate on, obviously, was death: more precisely perhaps on why people love this world and want so strongly to stay in it when it is an inescapable part of their nature ‘to die and go we know not where’. His imagination centred again on a kind of calque, a diagrammatic reversal. Since we die, he invented a race which did not. Since our ‘fairy-stories’ are full of the escape from death (as he remarked near the end of ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tree p. 68), ‘the Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness’. Certainly one was, his own tale of Beren and Lúthien as embodied in his ‘Lay of Leithian, Release from Bondage’, in which Lúthien alone of the elves is allowed as a favour to ‘die indeed’ and leave the world like a mortal."

Prof Tom Shippey, Road to Middle Earth Ch7

the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star.