The much-anticipated sequel has been a long, long, long time coming
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Is winter still coming, or what? If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to meet deadlines, it’s surely nothing compared to what George R.R. Martin is experiencing, as fans have been waiting for the next novel in the author’s “Game of Thrones” book series for 14 years now. Will the highly anticipated sixth installment, “The Winds of Winter,” ever be published, or will Martin’s epic fantasy series forever remain unfinished? Let’s take a look at all the status updates we’ve gotten so far, some promising and some very much not:
June 2010: Martin has written 4 chapters of ‘The Winds of Winter’
In a June 2010 blog, Martin announced he had moved two completed chapters (told from Arianne’s point of view) from “A Dance with Dragons,” the fifth book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, into the sixth book, “The Winds of Winter.” He described this as “good news for” “The Winds of Winter,” as he now had “four chapters done for that one (an Arya, a Sansa, and two Ariannes).”
July 2010: Martin has written more than 100 pages
The following month, Martin again said he had moved a chapter, this time focused on Aeron Greyjoy, into “The Winds of Winter” from “A Dance with Dragons.” “The good news is that I seem to have written more than a hundred pages of ‘The Winds of Winter’ already,” he wrote.
April 2011: Martin predicts ‘The Winds of Winter’ will take 3 years to finish
In an April 2011 interview with The Guardian, Martin predicted he would complete “The Winds of Winter” in about three years, a faster pace than the previous book. “Realistically, it’s going to take me three years to finish the next one at a good pace,” he said, adding, “I hope it doesn’t take me six years like this last one has.”
July 2011: ‘A Dance with Dragons’ is published
Martin published the series’ fifth novel, “A Dance with Dragons,” in July 2011. To this day, it is still the last full “Song of Ice and Fire” installment, and it ends with several major cliffhangers, including the apparent death of Jon Snow. The novel hit bookshelves just a few weeks after the “Game of Thrones” season 1 finale.
The month “A Dance with Dragons” was published, Martin tells Entertainment Weekly that he will return to working on “The Winds of Winter” in January 2012.
October 2012: Martin has written 400 pages
Martin provided a promising update in October 2012 when he told Adria’s News, “I’ve already written 400 pages of my sixth book, and I really look forward to publishing it in 2014.” However, he warned he was “really bad” at predictions, and “of these 400 pages, only 200 are really finished because I still have to revise the other 200 pages, which are in a rough version and I still have to work on them a lot.”
April 2015: Martin hopes to release the book by 2016
Despite Martin’s 2014 predictions, the book was nowhere to be found more than two years later. But in April 2015, he noted he was hoping to finish before the sixth season of “Game of Thrones: aired the following year, telling Entertainment Weekly this “has been important to me all along.”
This deadline was significant because season six was the point at which the HBO show began covering the events of “The Winds of Winter” in a major way after passing the published book material. Martin told EW he’s doing “anything I can do to clear my decks and get this done,” including canceling convention appearances.
January 2016: Martin reveals he missed multiple deadlines in 2015
In January 2016, though, Martin said it gave him “no pleasure” to report “The Winds of Winter” was still unfinished. He described how his publishers gave him two separate deadlines the previous year, first in October and then in December, to complete the book in order to ensure it would be out before “Game of Thrones'” sixth season, but “unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked.”
In May 2015, the October deadline “seemed very do-able to me,” Martin wrote. By August, Martin said he felt “confident” he could complete the book by the end of the year but missed both deadlines. “I tried, I promise you,” he wrote. “I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I’ve now blown the end of the year deadline.” Martin told fans he is still “months away” from finishing, “and that’s if the writing goes well,” though he is “not going to set another deadline for myself to trip over.”
This was when it became 100% certain that the HBO show would pass the books and effectively spoil the events of Martin’s unreleased novels as he shared details of his future plans with the series creators. “Look, I never thought the series could possibly catch up with the books, but it has,” Martin said. “The show moved faster than I anticipated and I moved more slowly.”
February 2016: Martin isn’t writing anything else until ‘Winds’ is finished
In a comment on his blog the following month, Martin promised he was “not writing anything until he delivered “Winds of Winter.” “Teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions, forewords, nothing,” he added. “And I’ve dropped all my editing projects but Wild Cards.” Martin, however, later walked this back.
January 2017: Martin predicts the book will be out ‘this year’
A year later, Martin admitted he was still “not done” with the book and said he hadn’t made as much progress “as I hoped a year ago, when I thought to be done by now.” He added, “I think it will be out this year. (But hey, I thought the same thing last year).”
July 2017: Martin confirms he’ll release ‘a Westeros book’ in 2018
Martin told fans that he is “still months away” from finishing “The Winds of Winter.” And despite his earlier statement that he wasn’t writing anything else until “Winds” was done, he is working on the book “Fire & Blood,” a history of the Targaryen dynasty. He says he isn’t sure whether “Fire & Blood” or “The Winds of Winter” will be published first, though. “I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018 … and who knows, maybe two,” Martin writes. “A boy can dream.”
April 2018: Martin confirms ‘Winds’ isn’t coming in 2018
A boy can keep dreaming; in an April 2018 blog, Martin confirmed “Winds of Winter” would not be published before the end of the year, so “you’re going to have to keep waiting.”
June 2018: Martin says ‘Winds’ is still his ‘top priority’
After news that HBO greenlit a pilot for its first “Game of Thrones” spinoff series, Martin assured fans that “Winds of Winter” remained his “top priority,” adding that it was “ridiculous to think otherwise.”
November 2018: ‘Fire & Blood’ is published
A new Westeros book did, in fact, come out in 2018, but it was “Fire & Blood,” not “The Winds of Winter.” “Fire & Blood” eventually serves as the source material for the Game of Thrones prequel series “House of the Dragon”.
The month of Fire & Blood’s release in November 2018, Martin told Entertainment Weekly he was “mad” at himself for not finishing “Winds of Winter” yet and has “had dark nights of the soul where I’ve pounded my head against the keyboard and said, ‘God, will I ever finish this? The show is going further and further forward and I’m falling further and further behind. What the hell is happening here?'” The Wall Street Journal reported Martin was “in hiding” at an undisclosed remote mountain “he visits when he wants to hunker down to finish a book.”
Later, during a Penguin Random House Q&A he said he paused working on “The Winds of Winter” for some time to finish “Fire & Blood” so it could serve as source material for the “House of the Dragon” series.
“I asked [Penguin Random House], ‘do you want me to just ignore the new show that’s coming down the pike, or should I finish [‘Fire & Blood’] so you can get it out, and then go back to [‘The Winds of Winter’]?” Martin explained. “And they said, ‘Yeah, give us the new book that’s closer to being done instead of two more books.’ So I put ‘The Winds of Winter’ aside for a while, and I concentrated on finishing ‘Fire & Blood.'”
May 2019: Martin jokes fans can ‘imprison me’ if he’s not finished by July 2020
Martin jokingly told fans that “if I don’t have ‘The Winds of Winter’ in hand when I arrive in New Zealand” for the World Science Fiction Convention in July 2020, “you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.”
June 2020: Martin still has a ‘long way to go’
Just a month before that infamous “imprison me” deadline, Martin wrote that he was “spending long hours every day” on the book and was “making steady progress.” But “it’s going to be a huge book,” he added, “and I still have a long way to go.” The pandemic gave him an out though, since the World Science Fiction Convention was virtual that year, meaning he technically never physically arrived there.
February 2021: Martin still has ‘hundreds of more pages to write’
Martin revealed that he wrote “hundreds and hundreds of pages” of “Winds of Winter” in 2020, calling it his best year on the project yet. “Why? I don’t know,” he mused. “Maybe the isolation. Or maybe I just got on a roll. Sometimes I do get on a roll.” However, Martin cautioned he still had “hundreds of more pages to write to bring the novel to a satisfactory conclusion,” adding, “That’s what 2021 is for, I hope.” But, “I have a zillion other things to do as well,” he noted.
March 2022: Martin admits he made ‘less’ progress in 2021
Martin wrote a similar blog near the start of 2022, stating that he’d “made a lot of progress on Winds in 2020, and less in 2021 … but ‘less’ is not ‘none.'” Martin seemed to be easing fans into the idea that “Winds” was no longer his only priority, in contrast to his prior promise to write nothing else until it was finished.
“Westeros has become bigger than ‘The Winds of Winter,'” he said, describing the “enormous number of projects” he has on his plate, including a second volume of “Fire & Blood” (which he has already written a “couple hundred pages” of) and more “Dunk & Egg” novellas. Plus, Martin pointed out he was “heavily involved” in all of the “Game of Thrones” spinoff shows, which have taken up a “ton” of his time and attention. “I know, I know, for many of you out there, only one of those projects matters,” Martin wrote. “I am sorry for you. They ALL matter to me.”
October 2022: Martin is ‘three-quarters of the way done’
Martin provided his most substantial progress update in years during a Penguin Random House Q&A in October 2022, revealing he’s “about three-quarters of the way done” with the book.
This same month, on The Late Show, Martin also said he had finished writing the storylines of “a couple of” characters. “But it’s still going to take me a while,” he added. To put this in perspective, these comments come over seven years after Martin felt he could realistically complete the book within a few months.
December 2022: Martin has 400 or 500 pages left to write
Martin got more specific in an interview on Stephen Colbert’s “Tooning Out the News,” saying he has written roughly 1,100 or 1,200 pages and needed to write “another 400, 500” more. Martin seems to be referring to manuscript pages, which differ from published book pages. For comparison, Martin said “A Dance with Dragons” and “A Storm of Swords” were about 1,500 manuscript pages, but they were each around 1,000 pages when published.
In his Penguin Random House Q&A, Martin suggested part of what’s been taking so long is his frequent rewriting. He found himself “re-reading some chapters that I’d written earlier, and I didn’t like them well enough, so I kind of ripped them apart and rewrote them.”
April 2023: Martin to produce new ‘Game of Thrones’ spinoff
A second “Game of Thrones” prequel series called “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight” was ordered in April 2023, and HBO says Martin will serve as writer and producer. This series will be based on his “Dunk & Egg” novellas.
But Martin still plans to publish more “Dunk & Egg” stories, so he once again finds himself in a situation where an HBO show could eventually pass his published material. “Before we reach the end of the published stories, I will need to find time to write all the other “Dunk & Egg” novellas that I have planned,” Martin said on his blog. “There are … gulp … more of them than I had once thought.”
November 2023: Martin hits another slump
Speaking to Bangcast, the author said he still only had 1,100 pages done, the same amount he had as of December 2022. “Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this but it’s tough,” he quipped. “That’s the main thing that dominates most of my working life.”
July 2024: Martin scolds impatient fans
The author has taken note of the wild speculation and impatience surrounding his progress that has been ruminating online. Last year he had a meeting with one of his editors in London and “the internet went nuts,” Martin said on his blog. But having meetings with his editors was just a part of doing business, and did not “signify that some momentous announcement is at hand,” he added. When the book is done, “the word will not trickle out, there WILL be a big announcement…where and when I cannot say.”
This update came a few months after Martin mentioned “Winds of Winter” while sharing his thoughts on another upcoming GOT spin-off, an adaptation of his novella “The Hedge Knight.” “The show will make its debut next year…and if it does well, ‘The Sworn Sword’ and ‘The Mystery Knight’ will follow,” he said. “By which time I hope to have finished some more Dunk & Egg stories (yes, after I finish ‘The Winds of Winter’).”
It’s easy to forget amid this epic delay that “The Winds of Winter” won’t even end the series, as Martin intends to follow it up with a seventh book, “A Dream of Spring.” On his blog, Martin said his plan is to “finish ‘The Winds of Winter,’ and then do either ‘A Dream of Spring’ or volume two of Fire & Blood, and slip in a new ‘Dunk & Egg’ between each of those in my copious spare time,” which should “keep me ahead of” HBO’s “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” As book fans know by now, though, Martin’s words are like the wind. They may have an effect, but they are unfortunately not quite tangible.
