What if the story you loved on television finished, had a prequel, and then another prequel was announced, all while you were still waiting for the next chapter of the original books? For fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, this is not a hypothetical. It is the reality. The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book, is, as you may have heard, taking a very long time.
The original Game of Thrones television series premiered just before the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, hit shelves in 2011. In the years since, the entire eight-season show has concluded, House of the Dragon has aired two seasons (with a third on the way), and another spin-off, based on his Dunk and Egg novellas and titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is imminent.
The wait, as one report puts it, puts the delays into stark perspective. While art should never be rushed, and no one is ‘owed’ a release, the sheer scale of the wait has become a saga in itself.
The Deadlines and Distractions for The Winds of Winter
The pressure is not new. Back in early 2016, with Game of Thrones Season 6 looming, Martin himself wrote about the struggle on his Live Journal page. He had desperately wanted his books to remain ahead of the television show. But as the sixth season fast-approached—the point where the series would significantly outpace its source material—those hopes were dwindling.
He revealed that to beat the show, he had been given, and subsequently missed, his first official deadline for The Winds of Winter: Halloween 2015.
‘Assuming the show would return in early April, that meant THE WINDS OF WINTER had to be published before the end of March, at the latest,’ Martin wrote. ‘For that to happen, my publishers told me, they would need the completed manuscript before the end of October. That seemed very do-able to me… in May. So there was the first deadline: Halloween.’
This 2015 deadline was just the first of several shifting goals. In 2020, Martin famously blogged that he hoped to have the book finished by the Worldcon in New Zealand in 2021, a deadline that also passed.
Even then, Martin was acknowledging the various issues behind the delays. His schedule had exploded following the success of Game of Thrones, and the demands of his workload were immense, stretching across myriad other projects as a creator, editor, or executive producer.
‘Unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked,’ he confessed. ‘You can blame my travels or my blog posts or the distractions of other projects (like his work on the Wild Cards series) and the Cocteau (the cinema he purchased and renovated in Santa Fe) and whatever, but maybe all that had an impact… you can blame my age, and maybe that had an impact too…but if truth be told, sometimes the writing goes well and sometimes it doesn’t.’
The ‘Gardener’ and the Sheer Scale of The Winds of Winter
This explanation—that he simply has good days and bad days—remains his consistent answer. Yet, whenever Martin’s name is attached to a new project that isn’t The Winds of Winter, a collective sigh erupts from the ASOIAF fandom. Many are resigned to the books never being finished. It is an understandable frustration, although, as the writer notes, Martin does not owe anyone anything and is free to work on whichever projects he desires.
Still, the delays are striking. While his busy schedule is a factor, the sheer scale of the story itself may be the larger culprit. It is worth remembering that this series was originally envisaged as a trilogy; it is now planned to be seven books.
The Winds of Winter is not even the final instalment, and it is expected to be at least 1,500 manuscript pages, making it roughly the same size as A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons, the two longest books in the series so far. In truth, Winds alone could probably fill two books. Martin has introduced so many characters and plot lines that it is difficult to keep track, let alone begin coalescing them for the final instalment.
The author’s self-professed writing style is another part of this. He has described himself as a ‘gardener’, not an ‘architect.’ He does not have detailed plans for everything. Instead, he knows the broad strokes and some destinations, begins writing, and goes where the story and characters take him, pruning different bits as it moves along. That approach has obviously worked, producing five classic fantasy books.
However, it has also meant some narrative cul-de-sacs and tangled webs to write himself out of, all of which complicates the writing process for The Winds of Winter. Martin famously struggled with the ‘Meereenese Knot’ in the previous book, a complex tangle of timelines and character arrivals in Daenerys’s storyline, and Winds must now resolve the cliffhangers left by that knot.
The Shadow of the Show and Hope for
Game of Thrones itself cannot have helped. The show filmed a version of the story he is still writing, not to mention the infamous backlash to its finale. That criticism may have been more about execution than ideas, but if Martin is planning on having Bran become king and Daenerys become the so-called ‘Mad Queen,’ the response would be enough to give anyone pause.
More simply, there is also a shift in the story Martin is telling: he is moving from something very ‘grey’ into setting up what is ostensibly a more black-and-white, good-versus-evil battle with the White Walkers. That alone could be difficult to pull off.
It is also not as if Martin has written nothing. Over the past decade, he has released 11 preview chapters from the book, including material for characters like Arianne Martell, Theon Greyjoy, Mercy (Arya Stark), and Sansa Stark (under the name Alayne Stone).
At last count, back in 2023, the author estimated he had written around 1,100 pages, and was 75% of the way done with the writing process. This implies that, even after more than 10 years, a final 25% of the novel—or roughly 400-500 pages—remains to be written.
If there is hope, it lies in that statistic. Martin still speaks passionately and determinedly about the series and insists finishing Winds is his priority. You do not spend 14 years working on something if you simply do not care about it.
If he was bored and wanted it over with, he could have rushed out a much worse version or handed it off to someone else. The fact he has done neither is, in its own way, some kind of positive sign—despite the many delays, struggles, and frustrations.
If The Winds of Winter is to come, though, let us hope it is not another 10 years.
The 1,100 pages written prove Martin’s dedication, yet the 14-year wait and the estimated 25% remaining test the fandom’s patience. The ‘gardener’ is still pruning a massive, complex story, one that the TV show already approached in its own way. While hope remains, the question is no longer when it will arrive, but if the wait will be worth it.
Originally published on IBTimes UK
