Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin has shared an update on the progress of the next A Song Of Ice And Fire novel.
The Winds Of Winter is set to be the sixth entry in the fantasy series following A Dance With Dragons, which was released back in July 2011.
- READ MORE: Here’s what we know about ‘House Of The Dragon’ season two
The 11-years overdue novel was discussed on satirical series Stephen Colbert’s Tooning Out The News, where Martin appeared opposite animated host Dr. Ike Bloom (voiced by Ikechukwu Ufomadu).
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During the episode, Bloom calls up fellow author James Patterson to give tips to “struggling writer” Martin who is “having trouble meeting deadlines”.
Asked how many pages he has written so far, Martin said he had completed around 1,100 to 1,200 pages of The Winds Of Winter, with “another 400, 500 pages” to go.
The last novel in the series, A Dance With Dragons, is just over 1000 pages in total. Martin has previously said that he expects The Winds Of Winter to be the longest book in the series.
“It’s a big, big book,” Martin said during a livestream in October. “It’s a challenging book. It’s probably going to be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series.
“A 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 about three-quarters of the way done, maybe. But that’s not 100 per cent done, so I have to continue to work on it.”
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Following The Winds Of Winter, Martin plans to release a seventh and final book in the saga titled A Dream Of Spring. He’s also currently developing a number of Game Of Thrones TV projects, including the second season of House Of The Dragon, animated shows and other spin-offs.
Nobody understands the waiting game quite like Game of Thrones fans. Loyal devotees of George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series have been hanging on for more than a decade since the last novel, A Dance with Dragons, was released in 2011, and the author has been pushing the next book's release date back ever since. (A clarifying point here: the HBO series based on the novels is named Game of Thrones, after the first novel. The collective novel series is titled A Song of Ice and Fire.)
“The Winds of Winter is going to be a big book,” Martin wrote on his blog earlier this year, by way of explanation for what Esquire called "the most public case of writer’s block in human history." Martin went on to add that the book "could be bigger than A Storm of Swords or A Dance With Dragons, the longest books in the series to date. I do usually cut and trim once I finish, but I need to finish first.”
In that update, Martin didn't give any indication of how close he actually was to finishing, so it's safe to say that fans of his A Song of Ice and Fire series will have to wait a while longer. For the uninitiated, this long book hiatus is a perfect opportunity to get caught up on the famously hefty novels.
As the much-anticipated prequel series, House of Dragons, which depicts the Targaryen civil war, wraps up season one, now is the perfect time to dive back into the books. Here's how to read them in order.
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2 A Game of Thrones (Book 1)
3 A Clash of Kings (Book 2)
4 A Storm of Swords (Book 3)
5 A Feast for Crows (Book 4)
6 A Dance with Dragons (Book 5)
7 The Winds of Winter (Book 6)
Debra L RothenbergGetty Images
And that brings us to the long, long, long-awaited sixth book.
After more than a decade, there's still no firm date on the calendar for The Winds of Winter, but Martin did offer a somewhat encouraging update in June of 2022. "Still working," Martin wrote on his blog. "Finally finished a clutch of Cersei chapters that were giving me fits. Now I am wrestling with Jaime and Brienne. The work proceeds, though not as fast as many of you would like."
Given the overwhelmingly negative response to the final season of HBO's Game of Thrones (which was the first to be written without source material from Martin) you have to imagine Martin is feeling the pressure to deliver. He even shared that his ending will be different than the show's ending.
George R.R. Martin is tired of giving updates about his upcoming fantasy sequel The Winds Of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in his best-selling A Song Of Ice And Fire series.
“I’m making progress, but I’ve given up on any hope of predicting the end,” he told Vanity Fair recently. “Every time I do, I don’t make it and everybody gets mad at me, and there’s no sense. It’ll be done when it’s done. Hopefully, COVID won’t kill me, so we won’t have that issue. I do find it a little grisly, people speculating online about what’s going to happen to the rest of the books when I die. I don’t like to speculate about that. I don’t feel close to dying.”
Which is good! If Martin felt ‘close to dying’ the fandom—including myself—would be distraught (and not just because Winds and A Dream Of Spring and the next Dunk & Egg novella and the second part of Fire & Blood wouldn’t come out!)
Still, while he’s done with speculation he’s not done entirely with updating us on his progress with the massive book.
On a recent stream with Penguin Random House, his publisher, the author revealed that he’s roughly 75% done with the novel, which he adds will be longer than any previous entry in ASOIAF (unless you count A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons one book which, in reality, they are).
Here’s Martin:
“It’s a big, big book, I’ve said that before. It’s a challenging book. It’s probably gonna be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series. 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 about three-quarters of the way done, maybe? But that’s not 100 percent done, so I have to continue work on it.”
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Being three quarters of the way done may sound hopeful to some fans, but I’m actually a little disheartened by this revelation. For one thing, it’s been over a decade since the last book came out in this series.
So if 75% has taken over ten years, then if the next 25% moves at roughly the same pace, we can predict Martin will finish Winds sometime in late 2025 or early 2026. Then again, the end of a book can be slower-going than the beginning so it’s entirely possible this will take longer.
BUT—and this is a very important but—that’s just when he’ll finish writing the manuscript. There are more considerations after the fact, like the whole editing process and the publication process itself, all of which takes time. Martin also notes that “there’s the issue here of my friends at Random House, when I deliver this monstrous book that will be as big as a dragon. Are they going to try to make me cut it in two? We’ll find out about that, but first I have to finish it, I have to get it all done.”
Splitting the book in two actually makes a lot of sense from the publisher’s viewpoint, and in some ways might benefit fans. Let’s say the manuscript is done in early 2026. Random House could release the first volume of Winds before Christmas and save the second half of the book for 2028 or 2029 as a stop-gap release, given that A Dream Of Spring could take another decade to come out (or more, or never).
My only concern here is that I really hated how they split Feast and Dance, with half the POV characters cordoned off into each book. That meant that from the start of Feast to the end of Dance the same amount of time passed—which also means that since the end of Storm of Swords only one book’s worth of timeline has actually taken place.
I’d rather have the book split chronologically than by characters if this happens again.
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