The first season of HBO’s epic fantasy TV series Game of Thrones premiered on April 17th, 2011. A Dance With Dragons, the fifth book of the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series (ASOIAF, from which Game of Thrones was adapted), was published three months later on July 12th, 2011. Since then, more than a decade has passed, the show’s final season concluded haphazardly in 2019, a pandemic ravaged the globe, and still there is no sixth book, The Winds of Winter, selling abundantly in bookstores around the world.
Is winter coming? Just where is the next installment in George R. R. Martin’s world-renowned epic fantasy novel series?
There are numerous factors at play interrupting Martin’s more than thirty-year project: the complications of ASOIAF’s unique point-of-view system, the expansion of the Ice & Fire world well beyond the medieval treachery of Westeros and the gaudy cultural-blend of Essos in The World of Ice & Fire, the extensive two-part history of the Targaryens in Fire & Blood, the Dunk & Egg novella series, and the numerous spin-off shows based on the Ice & Fire world currently in production.
In order to see what’s brought the author to this phenomenal rut, it’s best to start from the beginning. Let’s take a chronological look at each of George R. R. Martin’s updates in the past thirteen years to see what’s happened in all that time. It’s a long tale, one rife with anticipation and deceit, prophecies and tragedies, and the passage of time and the crippling effects of age — just like the very epic George R. R. Martin wishes to tell.
June 2010: Martin has written four 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 ASOIAF 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 ASOIAF installment, and it ends with several major cliffhangers, including the apparent death of a major character, 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 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 after passing the published book material. Martin told Entertainment Weekly that he is 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 its 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 percent 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 The Winds of Winter is finished.
In a comment on his blog the following month, Martin promised that he was “not writing anything” until he delivered The 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 The 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 The 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.
In the month of Fire & Blood’s release in November 2018, Martin told Entertainment Weekly he was “mad” at himself for not finishing The 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 that 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.”
Since then, Martin has had a prison sentence under his name.
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 The 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 television series, saying that 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 wrote 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.”
It’s easy to forget amid this epic delay that The Winds of Winter won’t even end the series, as Martin plans to follow it up with a seventh book and final 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, words are wind.
Is winter coming? Just where is the next installment in George R. R. Martin’s world-renowned epic fantasy novel series?