George R.R. Martin Reveals How Much Of ‘Winds Of Winter’ He’s Finished And How Much Is Left To Write

Games George R. R. Martin Reveals How Much Of ‘Winds Of Winter’ He’s Finished And How Much Is Left To Write Erik Kain Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

I write about video games, entertainment and culture. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Oct 26, 2022, 10:08am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The ‘Game Of Thrones’ and ‘House Of The Dragon’ creator still has a long ways to go.

FilmMagic 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. ” MORE FOR YOU Patrick Byrne Of Overstock Fame Says He Was Involved In Monthslong Effort To Overturn 2020 Election The AI Bill Of Rights – A Technology Perspective The Best New Movies And Shows On Netflix Today: October 26, 2022 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. What do you make of all of this? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook . As always, I’d love it if you’d follow me here on this blog and subscribe to my YouTube channel so you can stay up-to-date on all my TV, movie and video game reviews and coverage.

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