The publishing world moves even slower than the army of the dead, so it wasn't until a year later that George emailed them again and told them the deal to write an encyclopedia of Westeros was official. "2006 is when we signed the contracts, and we met our editor and George at the Anaheim WorldCon, and discussed ideas. [The publishers] trusted George to know what he was doing by inviting two fans who had no formal publication history to write and structure the bulk of it."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Keep in mind, the TV show wouldn't even be conceived until the same year the contracts were signed, so it's not like there was a raging demand from the public for all the secrets of Westeros yet. But now that the Garcias had the chance to make good use of their obscure knowledge, they set out to type every single complicated-ass Targaryen name.

Of course, no book comes together without a few speed bumps in the Kingsroad. And as they wrote, the Garcias hit on a difficulty that they should have seen coming: waiting on George R.R. Martin. (For those of you keeping track, the next book in the series has been overdue for roughly 47 years.)

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

"We started working in 2006, and it wasn't published until 2014 for various reasons, the big one being George. George wanted to have some role to some degree, but he got so delayed on the fourth book he said, 'I can't work on it now, I gotta jump straight into the fifth book.' And that one took a long while. It was after Dance With Dragons, late 2012, when he jumped in."

Martin looked at their 90,000-word manuscript and said, in essence, 'What about all this stuff you didn't include because I never wrote it down anywhere?'

"And he said, 'Well, the problem is all the notes are in my head.' He'd occasionally take breaks to get back to the sixth book, but there'd be days when we were writing and there'd be 8,000 new words about the history of the Ironborn or something, almost on a daily basis. His wife Paris told us George was like a man possessed with this stuff, he would toss and turn in his bed thinking about his ideas, then he'd get up at the crack of dawn, have his morning coffee, and go straight to his office to start writing."