Still Care About The Winds Of Winter? George R.R. Martin's 'Sorry For You'

George Martin rose to international fame way too late in his life: after having worked on A Song of Ice and Fire series and universe for decades, the author’s popularity skyrocketed only with the widely-beloved adaptation of his books — Game of Thrones. The overwhelmingly successful show brought GRRM millions of fans.

Unfortunately, the author is notorious for taking his sweet time with his writing. Game of Thrones had to improvise the final seasons due to the lack of source material, and fans…oh, those poor folks. It’s been over a dozen years since the last ASoIaF book, A Dance with Dragons, and so far, the weather forecast is rather, let’s say, calm.

As in, no The Winds of Winter in sight.

For twelve whole years, GRRM’s fans have been waiting for the next A Song of Ice and Fire entry, but the author is not the one to hurry. In fact, he even trolls his audience: he hid in the woods, released a bunch of other projects, accused fans of being “mean,” and even engaged in a legal lawsuit when someone used AI to actually finish The Winds of Winter for him.

Anything but writing does it for good old GRRM.

Now, Martin went even further: he addressed his fans’ woes and…told them he’s “sorry” for those who are waiting for The Winds of Winter! What an approach, man.

“I know, I know, for many of you out there, only one of those projects matters… I am sorry for you,” George Martin wrote in his not-a-blog, pointing out that to him, all his works matter.

In fact, there are quite a few things the author’s now busy with.

• House of the Dragon — despite not being involved with the spin-off series as actively as he was with Game of Thrones, the team consults GRRM all the same and helps showrunner Ryan Condal with many smaller decisions;

• Blood & Fire — the source material for House of the Dragon is but a tiny fracture of George Martin’s plans as he expands this book series in the ambition to cover the entire history of House Targaryen;

• The Tales of Dunk and Egg — a standalone novella series, The Tales follows the adventures of a knight and his squire, and the author plans to write up to a dozen of them…especially since MAX already ordered a TV show on them;

• Various Game of Thrones spinoffs — Seven Voyages or Sea Snake, 10 000 Ships, SNOW, the Conquest of Westeros, the Valyrian Empire…you name it, and Martin is either already working on it or is actively discussing it;

• In the Lost Lands — a completely standalone project, In the Lost Lands is a big-screen adaptation of GRRM’s older work (which is fantasy, too, don’t worry) that’s already scheduled to be released in February 2024;

• Wild Cards — an anthology series with a dark and twisted turn on superheroes, Wild Cards is written by over 40 authors curated by the one and only GRRM, and a TV series adaptation is currently in the works;

• Dark Winds — for this AMC series, George Martin serves as an executive producer so he’s deeply involved with the project and spends quite some time working on it;

• Who Fears Death — yet another HBO show that Martin helps develop, Who Fears Death is a post-apocalyptic fantasy (yep) with a phenomenal setting that the author is reportedly heavily involved with.

Coupled with the “sorry for you” comment, this list doesn’t exactly instill confidence about The Winds of Winter’s completion, does it? Fortunately, things might not be as scary as they seem since earlier this year, George Martin claimed that the next book was “three-quarters of the way done”... Though he didn’t sound too confident.

“It’s a big, big book, I’ve said that before. It’s probably gonna be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the story. Dance with Dragons and Storm of Swords are the two largest books in the series, they were both about 1,500 manuscript pages. I think this one is going to be longer than that by the time I’m finished with it and I think I’m around three-quarters of the way done, maybe,” Martin told Radio Times.

This sounds way more promising, but before we wrap up…we can’t miss the opportunity to ruin your hopes once again, can we?

If it took George Martin 12 years to get The Winds of Winter to 75% completion, this means he gets a quarter of the work done in approximately four years. This implies that the author is unlikely to finish the book until 2027 at the very least — and then again, there will be a ton of editing involved after he’s done with writing.

So if we were to guess, folks, the weather will remain calm until the end of this decade. That’s our forecast, take it or leave it.

Source: George Martin via Not a Blog, Radio Times