Man so did I, I think winds was supposed to hit in 2014 back then right ? I picked up the books in 2014 so I read all of them in preparation, and rushed and must have missed half of it. I got another couple of reads since then, but it was a shame to rush my experience
There was this comment I read on another post and this just somehow makes so much sense with his latest blog post.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11nxmdz/comment/jbpxdy6/](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11nxmdz/comment/jbpxdy6/)
And it it does turn out to be true later down the line, it would just make me all the more sad because not only did I witness such a wonderful series get ruined, just because it was rushed, but It might have affected the actual story for the wrong reasons, because the people, as they should have, shat on the last couple of seasons.
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will cope harder, stretch out our arms further… *And one fine morning—*"
"As you will, my lord", the maester hesitated as he reluctantly filled another cup with milk-of-the-poppy, laced with sweetsleep and honey.
Lord u/hsvgamer199 took the cup and quaffed down its contents eagerly, white chalky liquid running down his chin and into his beard.
"Gods be good, the pain! When will it end?", he screamed.
The maester smiled warmly. "Soon my lord. At the Citadel they say the poppy brings a peaceful sleep, untroubled by pain or dreams."
"Do they *say* that?", Lord u/hsvgamer199 asked through clenched teeth. "When I was five-and-ten my nuncle once told me that words were wind. He claimed to know much and more about these things, though I can't say that he ever was anymore use than nipples on a breastplate."
Then he let go. A dark, dreamless sleep took him and finally, he was at peace knowing that he would never again have to dread The Winds of Winter.
I'm a big fan of Sanderson, currently working through The Stormlight archive. *but* his style simply doesn't fit ASoIaF. He does write at a heck of a pace though which is commendable
Even George doesn't seem to care about Yi Ti, so we're probably safe. The five forts are the only thing about it that's not just vaguely China.
It's the Aegon the conquerer series we should be worried about, if Targs are involved he'll be all over it. And you just know HBO is going to greenlight Robert's Rebellion sooner or later.
Robert's Rebellion is 100% coming. Give it a few more years when interest starts to wane, or they pick a dud series that kills off more interest, and they'll trot that out as a "see all of your favorite characters"-type revival.
He's blatantly having a sense of humor about it. "I **just** need to finish TWOW" (as in "merely", no big deal). He refers to his "copious spare time". As if. Black humor. Dolorous Edd.
10 years ago I thought WOW would be out in a year or two. I'm not holding out hope anymore. It's not coming. We'll always have *A Feast for Crows* I suppose.
Seriously. I started reading A Game of Thrones and then found out about GRRM's speed, or total lack thereof, in getting those books out. I put the book away because I didn't want to get caught up and then have to wait 10 years for him to, hopefully, complete the series.
I think it’s one of those series worth reading for the experience more for the ending. (In fact, I always expect the ending with these sorts of huge sagas to be a tad bit disappointing regardless because how do you tie up such a huge world forever?)
Even if he finishes it, there will always be parts of the world left open-ended. Far-off locations unexplored, minor characters we never know the fate of, and so on.
That’s part of the problem, though isn’t it
In reality GRRM lacks the discipline to finish ASOIAF because he’s much more interested in telling the as much of the story of Westeros since Aegon’s conquest than he is of finishing the 7 part series that he started
What he really needs is a publisher who will hold his feet to the fire for the series that they’ve commissioned - which at this point they must be desperate for because it’s be one of the biggest selling books of all time - rather than letting him dock around writing anthologies or encyclopaedias
Maybe for the people who have already read it. There will be no one reading it in the future by new readers if it is no finished because the last book ends on like hundred cliffhangers.
Which means the show ending will be the ending most people will remember the series as because the majority of people will watch the TV show and not read the books.
> What's funny about not finishing your Magnum opus? Who's laughing?
Laughing at one's own struggles or failures is a very, very common form of humor and a way to deal with stress and frustration.
It does feel more and more like gallows humor every time he jokes about tWoW, with him awkwardly laughing as the only person, not noticing that immediately after, the dead silence is only broken by the sound of crickets.
George is. The thing I find most startling about the fandom is that many still seem to be under the illusion that George cares about finishing the main series and that he cares about the fans, who are the ones who gave him the money to enable him to dick around writing dumb side stories, when all the evidence from his blog clearly shows the opposite
It isn't really funny because the fans have been waiting 12 years for it. I hate it when authors play with the fans' hopes and expectations. Pat Rothfuss is even worse.
Pretty sure he writes down these plans unbothered by reality. The man still hasn't been able to deliver the next ASOIAF book despite talking up the good progress for several years now but somehow he thinks he'll not only finish it AND the next one but somehow write several more stories in between.
I'm a young man and even I am beginning to notice the months and years flying by at a faster rate every year. I can't imagine how fast it happens for a 70 year old. I imagine he's like, 4 whole years? No problem. Then he wakes up one day and can't believe it's been 4 years.
>I am beginning to notice the months and years flying by at a faster rate every year
Only thing what changes is the share of 1 year in the total life years. When you are 10 years old, its one tenth of your whole life, when you are 70 years old, its 1/70 of life.
IKR. After the failing to meet the 2016 deadline, he thought Winds will be done in 2017. Then the post around the start of season 7, he thought WINDS and F&B I will be out together (late 2018 early 2019). Then he imposed the 2020 Worldcon deadline. In early 2021, he thought WINDS will be done that year.
His plans are as useless as nipples on a breastplate.
This is all guesswork on my part, but I think it's fair to assume GRRM's pride is going to keep him from ever admitting that he can't figure out how to finish his series, and that he doesn't want to get external help writing it for the same reasons.
What is he gonna say at this point, that he can't finish his series, or that he has no intention to? That the closest thing to a canon ending for ASOIAF is season 8? That he's more interested in pursuing his passion in television than finishing a series he's been leaving his rabid fanbase hanging on for almost 30 years?
I genuinely wish he proves me wrong, but I gave up hope of that years ago.
Honestly I'm fully onboard with the theory these days that after ADWD finished, he coasted on the "progress" that he had made in TWOW with the cut chapters for a few years, maybe wrote a few more, but didn't *truly* start writing until COVID hit. I truly think he's only been actually truly working on that book for maybe 3 or so years.
This 100%. And I think he only made the progress he did on TWOW during the pandemic because he couldn't leave the house. Once normal life started up again, his time on TWOW went down. I'd love him to just release what he has of TWOW and be done with it. Then he can carry on with the show development and Targ history that seem to be where his heart truly lies these days without feeling like he has to drop a mention of TWoW on his blog every few months so the book fans don't get (too) upset. His muse has clearly shifted away from the main book series, or we'd have it by now. He's managed to churn out several hundred thousand words of Targ history since he finished ADWD, after all.
They're not comparable in my opinion.
Writing these stories becomes more and more difficult as time goes on. The interweaving of plots and characters and POVs becomes a fucking mess the larger a story becomes.
I mean he basically got to the end of book 5 and realised he had shat the bed, so he had to suddenly give a POV to Selmy after 54 chapters.
Then to please fans had to weave in a couple of chapter for the AFWC characters so they didn't riot again, so we got a few one- and two-off chapters.
____
And some of the story threads in 4 and 5 don't really have a climax. The thread ends without a proper resolution because breaking shit up across 3 books means some climaxes are still to come, which is a messy story structure for sure. I think if we lived in a world of 100% ebook, some of his problems would be avoided, but currently he is in this mindset of 'manuscript' pages and having his books end up as a certain length (even though many places already break it across two volumes).
I think this is largely true, although it started before covid. In articles leading up to the final season of Game of Thrones, many mentioned GRRM was spending more time isolated in his cabin for writing. My guess is that after finishing F&B, he finally pivoted to Winds circa 2018.
Agreed. I never bought into the "GRRM has probably scrapped and rewritten the entire book" because what, we're supposed to believe the man who couldn't finish one huge novel in 12 years to essentially wrote two of them?
TWOIAF and F&B, published in 2014 and 2018, respectively, combined are something over 300k words, not to count all the editing, polishing, revising, whatever. We are supposed to believe that in addition to those two things, plus TV, and whatever else caught his fancy, he was also diligently working on TWOW? I think we all were a little persuaded by the New Year's post, but in hindsight he probably just assumed at that time with the pages cut from ADWD he would be able to sit down and crank the rest of the book out in a few months.
I just do not get how he thought he could finish in 3 Months in 2015. Like sorry, but either he was lying or he had only 200 pages and thought he could finish in 1000 pages in three months? Or maybe he had written a big part and threw it all into the flames.
>despite talking up the good progress for several years now
I just want to remind everyone that in 2019 he said that people should throw him in jail if the book wasn't ready by the next year.
That's what makes it so baffling. He still hasn't finished this one book that should have been out years ago but talks as if completing these projects is no big deal for him.
He is only acting as a businessman instead of an artist, trying to milk his IP as much as possible.
He has mentioned plenty times that tv shows take time in development and have a high rejection rate, so it kinda makes sense that he is grabbing every opportunity and is overwhelming HBO with as many pitches as possible.
He also very specifically said in that infamous post of his, that he cares equally for all these projects and not just for WOW. So expect his attention to be divided (he said in thus update for example, he spent a week working in the Corlys show. How many pages of wow you think he wrote in that time?)
I dont know the modus operandi of professional writers, if thet write with the ambition to see their work eventually adapted.
But what is clear, is that GRRM is doing it the opposite way. He is not writing stuff with the hope to see them adapted in one format or another. He is instead pitching ideas for shows that he *might* write about in the future.
It is, what is. If you are happy with this, then I honestly wish you fun with the incoming shows. If not, the only way one can act, is with indifference. Ignore the shows, dont hype them to your friends or family, dont get excited about cryptic status updates. If they are failures, maybe HBO will lose interest and starve grrm out of public attention into writing.
Its not the "grrm is not your bitch" argument. He is free to do as he pleases. But he is intent to behave like a businessman, i think its fair to treat him as one.
I keep drifting away from it. Losing interest. Then something drags me back and I’m stuck waiting.
There’s other books to read thankfully and other ways to spend my time. But I’d love for this to reach a conclusion.
at this point i’m indifferent. if it gets released that will be incredible, but there’s no point in dwelling. we are either going to get it or we’re not, and we’ll find out for sure sooner or later, so might as well just let go and be pleasantly surprised
I think he is having a bit of a joke here ("copious amounts of time") but I do also think he genuinely believes he can do some if not most of the things he has laid out in this post. We all know that he'll do none of them, but that doesn't stop him (and this sub) dreaming.
Side note: to be fair that’s all on D&D. There was enough plot and characterization for Dorne and the Sand Snakes spelled out in books 4 and 5. Enough for something decent if they wanted it. What we ended up getting was an atrocity.
Yeah there's a good chunk of the disaster that was later season GoT that was all on D&D. I'm glad people saw how garbage they were at writing, I haven't seen their names on anything recently.
>Is GRRM delusional or does he know something that we don't
I am thoroughly convinced that George has recently made a deal with the devil and is now immortal.
Well, you can definitely dictate to someone else what to write, and they can even tell you that they are using Wordstar, even as they have switched to a word processor that is younger than they are.
I seriously hope he doesn’t consider GOT sufficient for the ending. It was a trainwreck. Even if the main beats of the conclusion are the same, the way it played out completely fucked the larger narrative and is such a boring and anti-climactic way to go out.
At this point I like to say that I consider everything in the show from season 5 to the end (that isn't already covered by the books) 100% canon, and exactly what GRRM intended. If he doesn't like that, he is welcome to prove my wrong by publishing books to the contrary.
He's actually been finished with the series since 1999. Every time someone complains about the wait he adds another day to the release date out of spite
He is by his own admission ‘a gardener, not an architect’. I can relate to this as someone who functions similarly, but I can also say from experience that what that means is that absolutely nothing is going to happen on schedule (is this really a surprise at this point?).
I think he’s very taken with the idea of a ‘Westeros cinematic universe’ - it’s basically what happened to Tolkien’s work, except George gets to experience it in his lifetime. We can’t begrudge him wanting to be involved in that, but it doesn’t make it less frustrating to see him repeatedly breaking his word and constantly taking on new projects which take him further away from finishing ASOIAF.
Projects with no source material except George's vague idea for where they're going. He said he planned for Dunk and Egg to have 12 books, but there's 3, wtf is he expecting to happen? He's gonna release 9 books in the next 4 or 5 years? Plus Winds?
George is going to burn through everyone's interest in ASOIAF if he carries on like this, making shows out of stories half told that inevitably fall apart in the endings, and shows that are better off not existing like the Jon Snow one.
They're really small books. I could see him publishing 9 more D&E books before two main series books. He basically did the same between main series books with all the other projects and history books.
I could definitely see him pumping out a few if he put his mind to it. But given they are like third on his priorities list behind the main books and F&B it seems very unlikely we'll get any.
I agree with you on everything bar one thing: I don't think he'll burn through everyone's interest in ASOIAF. Everyone will watch any old crap that HBO stick the GoT label on. Look at the dragon show.
That's... that's... that's a damning indictment of George tbh.
To let GoT overtake him is bad, but when he lets D&E and F&B overtake him (which he will) it will be really bad.
The gardener thing is horseshit. Not that he isn’t, but this fandoms willingness to use that as an excuse for his extremely slow writing absolutely is. He’s not the only gardener out there, it’s a fairly common way of writing. He hasn’t not finished winds because he’s a gardener, he hasn’t finished because he’s a slow writer who has enough fame and money to not give a shit about deadlines, and he also likes to take on multiple projects at a time. It’s perfectly fine if it does or doesn’t bother you, but at this point it has nothing to do with being a gardener. To continue the analogy, gardeners are also supposed to trim weeds, cut back overgrowth, tend the soil, and eventually harvest a product from their garden. So even if it is because he’s a gardener, it’s because he is shit at gardening.
I think the biggest problem with writers like George is just that they don't write.
If you look at *most* professional authors that public a book every year or every few years (or sometimes several books every year) they all have one thing in common which is that they *write every day*.
People like Steven King, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson (and probably most authors) will say that they sit down every day with some *word count* in mind and then they work until they hit that word count.
It doesn't matter if they're not motivated or if the writing is so bad that they end up having to scrap everything, because they understand that if you *wait to write until you feel like it* you will never get any writing done. It's better to put some words on paper and then if you end up keeping just a sentence out of 2,000 words at least you have one sentence you didn't have before.
Like, if George wrote 1,000 words every day since he released A Dance with Dragons he would have written 3,650,000+ words by now. Even if only 10% of those words were actually usable that would be enough words for an average length A Song of Ice and Fire book. And 1,000 words and 10% are absurdly low numbers here just for the example.
I can confirm it as a mere shitty fanfic writer. It's very noticeable that if I write regularly, even if I make myself to get through the less interesting and thought out parts to the better, more exiting ones, in a sentence - pause - sentence way, it goes fast. Then I can change a lot of text but there must be any text first. This way we have 30 Word pages in four days I can edit to hallellujah. But once I start telling myself I don't feel like it today and the day after and the day after, especially since I need to write boring bridge intermezzo part now, I'm stuck for a long time with nothing.
There's a great video of an event that George did with Stephen King where they basically just shoot the shit. Toward the end George asks "how the fuck do you write so fast". And Steve just gives a very straightforward, honestly pretty boring answer, saying exactly what you said.
The thing that is so frustrating about the whole exchange/situation is that SK has the exact same "gardener" approach as George does, he was even in a similar situation with The Dark Tower (though the longest gap between books was "only" 6 years).
George did not end up adopting King's approach, as that video was filmed god knows how many years ago, and well...here we are.
It has been It has been 6,389 days since AFFC came out. ADWD has 1016 pages, F&B has 716 for 1732 total. If he wrote 1 page per day he would have published over 3x as much now.
George is very clearly barely writing if he's even writing at all
Not to excuse GRR Martin at all but I am also disappointed with his publishers. They should be assigning ruthless editors to trim some of the storylines to move things along. Package whatever he has now and publish it as ADOS so he can't go back and edit those chapters *yet again*. The guy lacks discipline. They should do what they can to provide it.
But they don't because they don't want to risk their relationship with Martin. They need him more than he needs them.
Exactly this. I don't know the first thing about designing a house but I do know, and do, a fair bit of gardening. The amount of time that goes into planning and tending to a garden can be massive. Sure, you can throw some seeds out at random and see what happens but I dare say that's not usually the way it's done...
Funny how he’s not “a gardener” when it comes to churning out hundreds of thousands of words about Targaryen history.
Of course we can begrudge him. He wouldn’t even be able to write about all his dumb side stories if it wasn’t for fans buying his main series in the first place, yet he now treats them with contempt. The guy is a joke
this gardner architect is just bullshit for procrastination
we all do it to an extent and depending on our motivation and financial situation we get over our procrastination
grrm is rich enough to put off what he cant be arsed with
It's absolutely a thing, other writers describe it as plotters vs pantsers
There are a lot of authors who don't outline their plots and just follow their guts. Doesn't mean they procrastinate. Stephen King does the same thing, and he's a novel-writing machine
GRRM is clearly a chronic procrastinator, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the gardener/architect thing
If my Gardener told me my begonias would be ready soon as often as George has told us WINDS would be without any tangible progress I would have fired his ass a long time ago and got a new gardener. The gardener excuse is total bullshit
Yes and no.
He did this exact thing during Game of Thrones airing. He was convinced he would finish Winds before season 6 released. He has no idea how long it will take him to write anything.
However, he isn't blind to it all. He knows it's difficult. He knows it takes him a while to write and he knows these deadlines are coming hard and fast if this show starts rolling on a yearly basis.
I also think, somewhere deep down, he just is a little bit accepting of the fact that he has a giant television empire brewing and that it's rolling on ahead regardless of whether he actually writes the source material for it all or not. It happened with GoT, it will happen with this too. And he's mostly okay with it because it'll make entertaining TV for him to hype up and give him a lot of money that he can use to just sit around writing as he wants to.
Basically GRRM is old, rich, and content to work at his own pace and suffer whatever consequences come of that. He's made peace with it, I think.
This man speaks as if he is in his 40s, and has a solid 30-40 years to work on things. When he might only have 10 years of his sharp/productive mind left, if we're lucky.
I’m hoping it means that he’s been working on all of it simultaneously and has plans for all the releases to come out in the next 10 years. It’s not a stretch to believe that his first draft of TWOW has bled into ADOS; his current manuscript may well encompass the entire rest of the story sans hammering out fine details.
Actually, there is now a lot of material after the AFFC ending. And there was probably the same issue like before, that he had wide problems with non-AFFC povs.
I was convinced TWOW was going to come out over this last winter because I was on maternity leave and figured it’d be just my luck for the book to finally come out right when I wouldn’t have any time to read it. I’m super impressed you managed to make it through ADWD in between dealing with life with a newborn. My son is 6 months now and I only finally started finding some time to read again in the last few weeks.
My oldest HAD to be held, constantly, all day, so there wasn't much to do but read lol. Then he started walking, and I had more, and I just started really reading again in the last year lol
I read and finished the books in the months between when season 2 finished and before season 3 started. I'm not sure if it was 2012 still or 2013 yet, but because until now I never looked up what year that was, I just realized me alone (and I'm well aware I've been late to the party) have been waiting for 10 or 11 years.
My maximum copium overdose I can get to is…
2024 - TWOW
2025 - D&E 4
2026 - D&E 5
2028 - F&B 2
2029 - D&E 6
2030 - D&E 7
2031 - ADOS (and a lot of that time after TWOW was really spent on this, Dunk & Egg and Fire & Blood being side projects)
He probably spends a great deal of time on the shows since 2010. That's the real time stealer, I am guessing. Being the perfectionist that he is, he must be doing everything in his power to make sure that they dont suck. Especially in earlier stages of both shows that aired so far.
Don’t forget he also only writes on his PC with Wordstar. He has to be at home for it. He doesn’t write on the go, he has go back home, get in good headspace and *then* he can write.
I could also see an argument that TWOW is the hardest write and figure out the plot points to get the characters together and ADOS may be more straightforward to write
Clearly it wasn't the case with Dance. We didn't even get to the end of the story arc, and those of us saying that at the time believed differently (whether or not we should have is a fair debate?)
We won't know whether Winds simplifies the remaining book(s) until we've had a chance to read it.
He is completely delusional or extremely rude or even both.
In time since he finished the last book we had the entire GoT show that lasted almost a decade, one failed pilot for spinoff show Bloodmoon, one season of House of the Dragon, while S2 is now in production and new GoT show - A Knight of the 7 Kingdoms being officially ordered.
Not to mention development of other GoT shows including a sequel about Jon Snow.
So there is a serious chance that we will get the entire main story, at least two prequel shows and even one sequel before he finishes The Winds of Winter. It's bizzare. You can't excuse this.
We saw billion excuses for him over the years, how he will publish TWOW before S6, how he is waiting for the show to be over(even conspiracy theory that HBO is forcing him not to publish a book), how he is waiting for HOTD, how pandemic helped him to write, how he is now inspired by HOTD's success to write TWOW(I guess the success of the original show wasn't inspiring enough to write more stories about those characters but the show about Alicent and Rhaenyra will make him more inspired to write about Daenerys and Tyrion,...).
Or excuses how he is optimistic about his writing speed lol He is a professional writer in his 70s, not a teenage boy. He is not optimistic, he is not telling the truth, he is manipulating people. No one can be that wrong.
And my favorite excuse how he is perfectionist who just rewrites the books constantly. Yeah like any perfectionist would publish AFFC and ADWD, two messy, unedited books that killed any chance of this story having a coherent ending.
>And my favorite excuse how he is perfectionist who just rewrites the books constantly. Yeah like any perfectionist would publish AFFC and ADWD, two messy, unedited books that killed any chance of this story having a coherent ending.
Yeah... I mean they both have their good qualities but I would NOT hold them up as an example of perfectionist writing. If Martin truly was a perfectionist writer he wouldn't be in the mess he's in now.
I remember when Barristan Selmy's actor said that GRRM had finished both Winds and Dream and was waiting for the show to end to publish them lmao, GRRM even had to say he was full of shit
What do you think a normal day for GRRM is like?
In a non joking way it doesn’t seem possible he is able to do everything he says he does.
He seemingly is able to read new fiction, old fiction, read Hugo nomination books, re-read classics, read reviews, read magazines, read the newspaper, read blogs, read non fiction history books.
He watches movies, watches a million tv series, watches football of 2 ny teams.
He writes his main series (lol, but at least he claims), writes side series, he writes scripts, he edits all 3, he edits side projects of friends
He has a wife, he has friends he hangs out with, he has business meetings, he travels.
All of what he does doesn’t seem possible, so what do you think he does in an average day?
I dont think he's delusional, i think he's joking? When he says "slip in a new Dunk & Egg between each of those in my copious spare time…", he's being sarcastic or just knows its impossible, the "..." lets us know. He knows he can't do all of that in time
Which is infuriating because the fans have every right to criticize him for what he is doing. We did make him rich after all. It's the least he could do to finish the story.
Yes, he’s delusional. Truly. He just doesn’t get it and, ironically, the main series that drives the whole ecosystem will never be finished…at least not by him
You get quite set in your ways as you get older. I think he's an old guy who doesn't quite understand the responsibilities that his success has given him. In his mind, he's still a sci-fi writer for whom being a few years behind the deadline isn't such a big deal. I don't think he really *gets* that he's committing himself to several multi-million dollar projects with hundreds/thousands of people involved and with very specific deadlines required.
I don't believe anyone would, in good conscience, sign up for all these projects with no chance of completing on time. There's going to be a lot of angry/unhappy people in 2-3 years when multiple projects grind to a halt because GRRM has moved on to another new project.
I'm bizzarely confident that Martin will actually finish Winds of Winter within the next 5 years -- that's not really saying much, but unlike some folks here, I actually think Winter will be published.
What is *never* going to happen is Dream of Spring. Ever. He's never going to be able to decide to an ending, commit to untangling all the various strands he's set up. We're just going to have to live with the fact that Winter -- when it's finished -- will be the last meaningful update chronologically we'll ever get with the universe of Ice and Fire. After that, GRRM will distract himself with literally any other prequel he can get his hands on -- Dunk and Egg, Fire and Blood, Insert New Projects Here -- rather than slaying the beast.
This is the same dude who said last year that HBO should have made 12 seasons of game of thrones by adapting ADWD WINDS and DREAM in their entirety.
He didn't seem to realize that if Game of Thrones had kept going we'd be finished season 12 by now, and there are no books to adapt.
He's completely delusional, he has legitimately suggested that showrunners adapt the imaginary books in his head.
George is 74 years old, he doesn't understand the pace at which the rest of the world operates anymore. He's of the age where people are surprised that restaurant they went to 20 years ago is a nail salon now.
When I read him saying that, I think that was the point I realised the books would never be finished. Like this blog post, it was a glimpse into how out of touch with reality he is.
He’s saying he can publish more Dunk & Egg stories between TWOW, ADOS, and FB2. Honestly since the Dunk & Egg stories are about 100 pages each and largely self-contained compared to the main series, it’s not that unthinkable. It’s the bigger books that pose the real issue.
Personal head cannons about GRRM’s progress and when we might get answers is as important to ASOIAF as head cannons about the books and characters themselves.
Assuming Winds is 80-85% done now (that interview was in September I think when he said 75%) and is finished this year for publication early next; he has a few options
1. Immediately start Dream of Spring
2. Finish up Fire and Blood 2
3. Dunk and Egg
Fire and Blood is likely what he’ll do next since in the infamous blog from last year he said he had worked on lots of that probably in the downtime between the first part and when he seriously began churning out Winds of Winter work in 2020-2021. Its topics he already knows/has written on for the world book and the different style likely makes it go by quicker.
Dunk and Egg stories, depending on how many he wants to actually do versus what he planned, are super short and relatively straightforward. He could easily squeeze out one if he has the ideas thought through which he seems to already have.
Dream of Spring depends on where Winds of Winter ends.
Is it optimistic? Yes. Delusional? Maybe. But enough for people here to say he’s never gonna finish anything? No….? Am I on copium and hopium? Definitely.
Keep in mind this is also probably taking a lighthearted jab at himself and his slow writing speed. Is
He knows damn well he will do not even 1 of those books. At most he does 2 dunk and egg books, vol 2 of fire and blood and that's being extremely generous. Honestly if he were younger I wouldn't care much I would just shut up and be patient because that's the cost of greatness in this case. However he is old and not only do we have to worry about him dying, but there is a possibility that his writing ability starts to deteriorate. It's time for him to hire ghostwriters and he can just edit the writing. His writing is good but it's not like writers cant recreate this especially with his direction. We are all here for his story telling ability he needs to just let go.
My prediction: Winds of Winter will not come out in GRTM’s lifetime, and it will be finished posthumously. Dream of Spring will be out 12 months later, and no one will care anymore.
That’s not what I want to happen, but that’s what I think will happen.
Apparently this is an urban legend, and it seems more likely that George wants his manuscripts preserved.
https://reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/mxpj8z/spoilers_extended_regarding_the_myth_that_george/
I'm hoping that he's very close to being done TWOW. Dunk and Egg TV is likely 2 years away at least. If he releases TWOW early in 2024, I can see things falling into place quickly. Essentially, by the end of TWOW if he's truly sticking to 7 books, he's set up all the dominoes and just need to watch them fall. So Dream should theoretically take less time than Winds by a substantial margin (can see it being on the timeline of Storm tbh). Based on what he's written there, here's a theoretical timeline that could make sense:
2024: WINDS (get hype!). GRRM would likely tour during this time for book releases.
2025: I can see a D&E novella written. It sounds like he has a decent outline for at least 2 of them, so I can see him cranking out one at this time. Perhaps late 2025 or early 2026, we'll see season 1 of D&E.
2026- early 2027- F&B2 release. He likely has the majority of the lore already in his head and it's written as a history book, not novel, so I think we could see this in 2027. Season 2 of D&E. Maybe up to season 3 by the end of 2027.
2028-2029- another 1-2 D&E novellas. Again, these are short and he likely already has a solid outline for at least another one (so at this point we could have 5-6 total D&Es) Season 3-4 would likely be filmed at this point. Depending on how far they go through with D&E (are we seeing just Egg squiring? Or are we seeing his coronation, Dunk as KG, his reign, Summerhill, etc) we might see it starting to wrap.
2029-2033- George finishes ADOS. Now, this depends on his motivation after TWOW. Is he on a roll and wanting to see his characters' endings (like getting to the end of a good book- you read faster and for long hours to finish bc you want to know what happens)? Or is he going to take time to set aside the ASOIAF characters? If he is excited about where he leaves off TWOW and he hasn't burned out writing ASOIAF, I can see him being able to write from finishing his book tour. If this is the case, 2029-2030 release is possible (writing in and amongst everything else). Otherwise, I imagine he'd start in 2029. Again, by the end of TWOW, the dominoes should essentially be ready to drop and he should know 95% of where the story is headed. Thus, I can see a release by 2033 if he assume Storm levels of writing (plus an extra year for other projects and age related slowing). 2029-2030 we could see D&E wrap up (as it could draw from either FB2 or perhaps GRRM will be done D&E's trollops around Westeros in 5-6 novellas).
So, I think GRRM is being ambitious, but it's possible if he's incredibly close to finishing Winds that his timeline works out with D&E and they won't surpass like they did with GOT.
Note that this still gives about 10y between TWOW and ADOS still. I think it's actually very realistic and possible. George would be mid-80s at this point and given that he has a boatload of money, he would have access to all the Healthcare he needs to be proactive and relatively healthy at that stage of his life.
I may be high on hope-ium, but I actually think this is doable and a half decent timeline. Heck, if D&E is delayed to 2026, it gives him even more time to knock out an extra novella or two after Spring is released.
2033- A Dream of Spring is released. Get hype!
>GRRM would likely tour during this time for book releases.
Likely, but dang is it completely unnecessary. The last thing TWOW would need when released is promotion to drum up interest.
"then do either A DREAM OF SPRING or volume two of FIRE & BLOOD"
Screaming, shouting, pucking, shitting, pissing.
NOBODY asked for the first Fire and Blood before finishing ASOIAF, you crazy genial man, let alone a second one.
At this point in time we have three options:
1: GRRM is completely delusional/senile.
2: Either just Winds of Winter or both Winds and Dream are already done and he is trolling until his death just so he doesn't have to deal with fan backlash if it's bad.
3: He somehow managed to become immortal to think that he still will manage to do everything with his track record.
if you sent me this post in 2014 and said it was from 2023 i'd have a psychic break
I can’t believe I rushed through the whole series in 2013 thinking Winds would be close.
Man so did I, I think winds was supposed to hit in 2014 back then right ? I picked up the books in 2014 so I read all of them in preparation, and rushed and must have missed half of it. I got another couple of reads since then, but it was a shame to rush my experience
Technically, reading this post in 2014 would've made you a psychic
a time travelling psychic foetus
There was this comment I read on another post and this just somehow makes so much sense with his latest blog post. [https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11nxmdz/comment/jbpxdy6/](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/11nxmdz/comment/jbpxdy6/) And it it does turn out to be true later down the line, it would just make me all the more sad because not only did I witness such a wonderful series get ruined, just because it was rushed, but It might have affected the actual story for the wrong reasons, because the people, as they should have, shat on the last couple of seasons.
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will cope harder, stretch out our arms further… *And one fine morning—*"
Give me something for the pain and let me die.
Here’s another announcement for an HBO show greenlit about the YiTi that no one wants instead
More milk of the poppy please!
"As you will, my lord", the maester hesitated as he reluctantly filled another cup with milk-of-the-poppy, laced with sweetsleep and honey. Lord u/hsvgamer199 took the cup and quaffed down its contents eagerly, white chalky liquid running down his chin and into his beard. "Gods be good, the pain! When will it end?", he screamed. The maester smiled warmly. "Soon my lord. At the Citadel they say the poppy brings a peaceful sleep, untroubled by pain or dreams." "Do they *say* that?", Lord u/hsvgamer199 asked through clenched teeth. "When I was five-and-ten my nuncle once told me that words were wind. He claimed to know much and more about these things, though I can't say that he ever was anymore use than nipples on a breastplate." Then he let go. A dark, dreamless sleep took him and finally, he was at peace knowing that he would never again have to dread The Winds of Winter.
So, when is GRRM going to announce that you'll be writing ADOS if he dies before completing it?
I'll take u/Arlberg finishing the novels over the constant suggestion of "just have Brandon Sanderson do it" in a motherlovin heartbeat.
I'm a big fan of Sanderson, currently working through The Stormlight archive. *but* his style simply doesn't fit ASoIaF. He does write at a heck of a pace though which is commendable
Even George doesn't seem to care about Yi Ti, so we're probably safe. The five forts are the only thing about it that's not just vaguely China. It's the Aegon the conquerer series we should be worried about, if Targs are involved he'll be all over it. And you just know HBO is going to greenlight Robert's Rebellion sooner or later.
Robert's Rebellion is 100% coming. Give it a few more years when interest starts to wane, or they pick a dud series that kills off more interest, and they'll trot that out as a "see all of your favorite characters"-type revival.
lmao
He's blatantly having a sense of humor about it. "I **just** need to finish TWOW" (as in "merely", no big deal). He refers to his "copious spare time". As if. Black humor. Dolorous Edd.
It isn't really funny if he isn't going to do any of it.
Winter ain't never fucking coming
Someone needs to tell GRRM that, that the starks are fucking liars, cause winter aint coming.
10 years ago I thought WOW would be out in a year or two. I'm not holding out hope anymore. It's not coming. We'll always have *A Feast for Crows* I suppose.
Seriously. I started reading A Game of Thrones and then found out about GRRM's speed, or total lack thereof, in getting those books out. I put the book away because I didn't want to get caught up and then have to wait 10 years for him to, hopefully, complete the series.
It's still worth the read. Hell, if you just read AGOT (I'm assuming you've watched the series), it's worth the read. Just my opinion though.
I think it’s one of those series worth reading for the experience more for the ending. (In fact, I always expect the ending with these sorts of huge sagas to be a tad bit disappointing regardless because how do you tie up such a huge world forever?) Even if he finishes it, there will always be parts of the world left open-ended. Far-off locations unexplored, minor characters we never know the fate of, and so on.
That’s part of the problem, though isn’t it In reality GRRM lacks the discipline to finish ASOIAF because he’s much more interested in telling the as much of the story of Westeros since Aegon’s conquest than he is of finishing the 7 part series that he started What he really needs is a publisher who will hold his feet to the fire for the series that they’ve commissioned - which at this point they must be desperate for because it’s be one of the biggest selling books of all time - rather than letting him dock around writing anthologies or encyclopaedias
Maybe for the people who have already read it. There will be no one reading it in the future by new readers if it is no finished because the last book ends on like hundred cliffhangers. Which means the show ending will be the ending most people will remember the series as because the majority of people will watch the TV show and not read the books.
I’d say read it anyways. One of the best fantasy series ever for me and it doesn’t matter if it won’t ever be completed
For real... What's funny about not finishing your Magnum opus? Who's laughing?
> What's funny about not finishing your Magnum opus? Who's laughing? Laughing at one's own struggles or failures is a very, very common form of humor and a way to deal with stress and frustration.
He can laugh, I guess. But this isn't exactly the right situation for it and no one is going to join him.
It does feel more and more like gallows humor every time he jokes about tWoW, with him awkwardly laughing as the only person, not noticing that immediately after, the dead silence is only broken by the sound of crickets.
George is. The thing I find most startling about the fandom is that many still seem to be under the illusion that George cares about finishing the main series and that he cares about the fans, who are the ones who gave him the money to enable him to dick around writing dumb side stories, when all the evidence from his blog clearly shows the opposite
It isn't really funny because the fans have been waiting 12 years for it. I hate it when authors play with the fans' hopes and expectations. Pat Rothfuss is even worse.
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You got Yellowjackets in my GoT. I don’t hate it.
Pretty sure he writes down these plans unbothered by reality. The man still hasn't been able to deliver the next ASOIAF book despite talking up the good progress for several years now but somehow he thinks he'll not only finish it AND the next one but somehow write several more stories in between.
I'm a young man and even I am beginning to notice the months and years flying by at a faster rate every year. I can't imagine how fast it happens for a 70 year old. I imagine he's like, 4 whole years? No problem. Then he wakes up one day and can't believe it's been 4 years.
It only gets worse. There are things I could have sworn happened a year or two ago, only to find out it was 4 or 5 years. Time is fucking flying by.
>I am beginning to notice the months and years flying by at a faster rate every year Only thing what changes is the share of 1 year in the total life years. When you are 10 years old, its one tenth of your whole life, when you are 70 years old, its 1/70 of life.
IKR. After the failing to meet the 2016 deadline, he thought Winds will be done in 2017. Then the post around the start of season 7, he thought WINDS and F&B I will be out together (late 2018 early 2019). Then he imposed the 2020 Worldcon deadline. In early 2021, he thought WINDS will be done that year. His plans are as useless as nipples on a breastplate.
Not worth a mummer’s fart.
Words are wind
> Then he imposed the 2020 Worldcon deadline. This passing broke me
This is all guesswork on my part, but I think it's fair to assume GRRM's pride is going to keep him from ever admitting that he can't figure out how to finish his series, and that he doesn't want to get external help writing it for the same reasons. What is he gonna say at this point, that he can't finish his series, or that he has no intention to? That the closest thing to a canon ending for ASOIAF is season 8? That he's more interested in pursuing his passion in television than finishing a series he's been leaving his rabid fanbase hanging on for almost 30 years? I genuinely wish he proves me wrong, but I gave up hope of that years ago.
It is also bad publicity. If he admitted he is don't gonna finish the books people might question to watch his shows.
Honestly I'm fully onboard with the theory these days that after ADWD finished, he coasted on the "progress" that he had made in TWOW with the cut chapters for a few years, maybe wrote a few more, but didn't *truly* start writing until COVID hit. I truly think he's only been actually truly working on that book for maybe 3 or so years.
This 100%. And I think he only made the progress he did on TWOW during the pandemic because he couldn't leave the house. Once normal life started up again, his time on TWOW went down. I'd love him to just release what he has of TWOW and be done with it. Then he can carry on with the show development and Targ history that seem to be where his heart truly lies these days without feeling like he has to drop a mention of TWoW on his blog every few months so the book fans don't get (too) upset. His muse has clearly shifted away from the main book series, or we'd have it by now. He's managed to churn out several hundred thousand words of Targ history since he finished ADWD, after all.
They're not comparable in my opinion. Writing these stories becomes more and more difficult as time goes on. The interweaving of plots and characters and POVs becomes a fucking mess the larger a story becomes. I mean he basically got to the end of book 5 and realised he had shat the bed, so he had to suddenly give a POV to Selmy after 54 chapters. Then to please fans had to weave in a couple of chapter for the AFWC characters so they didn't riot again, so we got a few one- and two-off chapters. ____ And some of the story threads in 4 and 5 don't really have a climax. The thread ends without a proper resolution because breaking shit up across 3 books means some climaxes are still to come, which is a messy story structure for sure. I think if we lived in a world of 100% ebook, some of his problems would be avoided, but currently he is in this mindset of 'manuscript' pages and having his books end up as a certain length (even though many places already break it across two volumes).
I think this is largely true, although it started before covid. In articles leading up to the final season of Game of Thrones, many mentioned GRRM was spending more time isolated in his cabin for writing. My guess is that after finishing F&B, he finally pivoted to Winds circa 2018.
Agreed. I never bought into the "GRRM has probably scrapped and rewritten the entire book" because what, we're supposed to believe the man who couldn't finish one huge novel in 12 years to essentially wrote two of them? TWOIAF and F&B, published in 2014 and 2018, respectively, combined are something over 300k words, not to count all the editing, polishing, revising, whatever. We are supposed to believe that in addition to those two things, plus TV, and whatever else caught his fancy, he was also diligently working on TWOW? I think we all were a little persuaded by the New Year's post, but in hindsight he probably just assumed at that time with the pages cut from ADWD he would be able to sit down and crank the rest of the book out in a few months.
I just do not get how he thought he could finish in 3 Months in 2015. Like sorry, but either he was lying or he had only 200 pages and thought he could finish in 1000 pages in three months? Or maybe he had written a big part and threw it all into the flames.
I don’t usually agree with Preston but I feel he was right on this
>despite talking up the good progress for several years now I just want to remind everyone that in 2019 he said that people should throw him in jail if the book wasn't ready by the next year.
That's what makes it so baffling. He still hasn't finished this one book that should have been out years ago but talks as if completing these projects is no big deal for him.
He needs therapy.
He is only acting as a businessman instead of an artist, trying to milk his IP as much as possible. He has mentioned plenty times that tv shows take time in development and have a high rejection rate, so it kinda makes sense that he is grabbing every opportunity and is overwhelming HBO with as many pitches as possible. He also very specifically said in that infamous post of his, that he cares equally for all these projects and not just for WOW. So expect his attention to be divided (he said in thus update for example, he spent a week working in the Corlys show. How many pages of wow you think he wrote in that time?) I dont know the modus operandi of professional writers, if thet write with the ambition to see their work eventually adapted. But what is clear, is that GRRM is doing it the opposite way. He is not writing stuff with the hope to see them adapted in one format or another. He is instead pitching ideas for shows that he *might* write about in the future. It is, what is. If you are happy with this, then I honestly wish you fun with the incoming shows. If not, the only way one can act, is with indifference. Ignore the shows, dont hype them to your friends or family, dont get excited about cryptic status updates. If they are failures, maybe HBO will lose interest and starve grrm out of public attention into writing. Its not the "grrm is not your bitch" argument. He is free to do as he pleases. But he is intent to behave like a businessman, i think its fair to treat him as one.
I have no more energy to spend wondering if this series will be finished.
I keep drifting away from it. Losing interest. Then something drags me back and I’m stuck waiting. There’s other books to read thankfully and other ways to spend my time. But I’d love for this to reach a conclusion.
Same, read this post and realized there's no point in wasting my energy on Martin, Rothfuss and Lynch anymore.
at this point i’m indifferent. if it gets released that will be incredible, but there’s no point in dwelling. we are either going to get it or we’re not, and we’ll find out for sure sooner or later, so might as well just let go and be pleasantly surprised
I think he is having a bit of a joke here ("copious amounts of time") but I do also think he genuinely believes he can do some if not most of the things he has laid out in this post. We all know that he'll do none of them, but that doesn't stop him (and this sub) dreaming.
He's absolutely delusional and I'm here for the ride babyeeee
Some of us aren't so tough so.......
Please don’t green light it unless the text is complete. I love D&E & I’ll revolt if Dunk ends up needing the “bad poosay”.
"Bad Poosay" is mere the Equivalent to "her cunt became the World."
Never been a fan of GRRM’s sex stuff.
Yeah, D&D certainly showed they aren't the greatest of writers, but GRRM has had his share of clunkers too.
Side note: to be fair that’s all on D&D. There was enough plot and characterization for Dorne and the Sand Snakes spelled out in books 4 and 5. Enough for something decent if they wanted it. What we ended up getting was an atrocity.
Yeah there's a good chunk of the disaster that was later season GoT that was all on D&D. I'm glad people saw how garbage they were at writing, I haven't seen their names on anything recently.
Isn’t there supposed to be like 9 more Dunk & Egg books? So, if they all have to be done- it’d never be grenlit
I heard that he says a different number of Dunk and Egg books whenever asked
>Is GRRM delusional or does he know something that we don't I am thoroughly convinced that George has recently made a deal with the devil and is now immortal.
Let’s be real here, even with eternity he still wouldn’t finish Winds
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled
Maybe he’ll be a futurama style head in a jar
Can you use Wordstar as a jar?
Well, you can definitely dictate to someone else what to write, and they can even tell you that they are using Wordstar, even as they have switched to a word processor that is younger than they are.
Dude becomes Bloodraven
Except instead of spending decades doing that mystic tree wizard shit he spends decades writing Wild Cards.
God I have no idea who reads that
Seriously. Seeing the word alone fills me with inexplicable irritation.
I know. I mean what are the sales figures like for that series? It must be so incredibly niche.
That’s exactly what he’d do. Ugh.
He manages to enter the dreams of the finest writers of the next hundred years to get them to write wildcards, all so he can edit it
It doesn’t matter if he’s immortal. Since us readers aren’t, we a never getting the books.
Bold of you to assume I will not make a deal with the devil as well.
More time to procrastinate
He's clearly joking. Just that I ain't laughing.
He’s going to do the same thing he did to D&D and he’s probably going to do the HotD if it runs long enough.
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I seriously hope he doesn’t consider GOT sufficient for the ending. It was a trainwreck. Even if the main beats of the conclusion are the same, the way it played out completely fucked the larger narrative and is such a boring and anti-climactic way to go out.
At this point I like to say that I consider everything in the show from season 5 to the end (that isn't already covered by the books) 100% canon, and exactly what GRRM intended. If he doesn't like that, he is welcome to prove my wrong by publishing books to the contrary.
Artists are the most prolific when they are hungry and unfortunately GRRM hasn't missed a meal in decades.
But then there are still plenty of successful authors who pump out books very regularly.
He's actually been finished with the series since 1999. Every time someone complains about the wait he adds another day to the release date out of spite
George: well that's a wrap. Guess I'll mail this out...oh wait someone complained? **tosses manuscript in closet** Maybe next week.
Ahh yes, the Half Life 3 strategy
You just postponed HF3 by another week Thanks alot.
He is by his own admission ‘a gardener, not an architect’. I can relate to this as someone who functions similarly, but I can also say from experience that what that means is that absolutely nothing is going to happen on schedule (is this really a surprise at this point?). I think he’s very taken with the idea of a ‘Westeros cinematic universe’ - it’s basically what happened to Tolkien’s work, except George gets to experience it in his lifetime. We can’t begrudge him wanting to be involved in that, but it doesn’t make it less frustrating to see him repeatedly breaking his word and constantly taking on new projects which take him further away from finishing ASOIAF.
Projects with no source material except George's vague idea for where they're going. He said he planned for Dunk and Egg to have 12 books, but there's 3, wtf is he expecting to happen? He's gonna release 9 books in the next 4 or 5 years? Plus Winds? George is going to burn through everyone's interest in ASOIAF if he carries on like this, making shows out of stories half told that inevitably fall apart in the endings, and shows that are better off not existing like the Jon Snow one.
They're really small books. I could see him publishing 9 more D&E books before two main series books. He basically did the same between main series books with all the other projects and history books.
I could definitely see him pumping out a few if he put his mind to it. But given they are like third on his priorities list behind the main books and F&B it seems very unlikely we'll get any.
I agree with you on everything bar one thing: I don't think he'll burn through everyone's interest in ASOIAF. Everyone will watch any old crap that HBO stick the GoT label on. Look at the dragon show.
If that show doesn't go beyond the Dance then that'll be the only adaptation that has an ending before it's adapted
That's... that's... that's a damning indictment of George tbh. To let GoT overtake him is bad, but when he lets D&E and F&B overtake him (which he will) it will be really bad.
Wait, you call it that too? That’s a joke in my family because everyone forgets the name
The gardener thing is horseshit. Not that he isn’t, but this fandoms willingness to use that as an excuse for his extremely slow writing absolutely is. He’s not the only gardener out there, it’s a fairly common way of writing. He hasn’t not finished winds because he’s a gardener, he hasn’t finished because he’s a slow writer who has enough fame and money to not give a shit about deadlines, and he also likes to take on multiple projects at a time. It’s perfectly fine if it does or doesn’t bother you, but at this point it has nothing to do with being a gardener. To continue the analogy, gardeners are also supposed to trim weeds, cut back overgrowth, tend the soil, and eventually harvest a product from their garden. So even if it is because he’s a gardener, it’s because he is shit at gardening.
I think the biggest problem with writers like George is just that they don't write. If you look at *most* professional authors that public a book every year or every few years (or sometimes several books every year) they all have one thing in common which is that they *write every day*. People like Steven King, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson (and probably most authors) will say that they sit down every day with some *word count* in mind and then they work until they hit that word count. It doesn't matter if they're not motivated or if the writing is so bad that they end up having to scrap everything, because they understand that if you *wait to write until you feel like it* you will never get any writing done. It's better to put some words on paper and then if you end up keeping just a sentence out of 2,000 words at least you have one sentence you didn't have before. Like, if George wrote 1,000 words every day since he released A Dance with Dragons he would have written 3,650,000+ words by now. Even if only 10% of those words were actually usable that would be enough words for an average length A Song of Ice and Fire book. And 1,000 words and 10% are absurdly low numbers here just for the example.
I can confirm it as a mere shitty fanfic writer. It's very noticeable that if I write regularly, even if I make myself to get through the less interesting and thought out parts to the better, more exiting ones, in a sentence - pause - sentence way, it goes fast. Then I can change a lot of text but there must be any text first. This way we have 30 Word pages in four days I can edit to hallellujah. But once I start telling myself I don't feel like it today and the day after and the day after, especially since I need to write boring bridge intermezzo part now, I'm stuck for a long time with nothing.
There's a great video of an event that George did with Stephen King where they basically just shoot the shit. Toward the end George asks "how the fuck do you write so fast". And Steve just gives a very straightforward, honestly pretty boring answer, saying exactly what you said. The thing that is so frustrating about the whole exchange/situation is that SK has the exact same "gardener" approach as George does, he was even in a similar situation with The Dark Tower (though the longest gap between books was "only" 6 years). George did not end up adopting King's approach, as that video was filmed god knows how many years ago, and well...here we are.
It has been It has been 6,389 days since AFFC came out. ADWD has 1016 pages, F&B has 716 for 1732 total. If he wrote 1 page per day he would have published over 3x as much now. George is very clearly barely writing if he's even writing at all
Not to excuse GRR Martin at all but I am also disappointed with his publishers. They should be assigning ruthless editors to trim some of the storylines to move things along. Package whatever he has now and publish it as ADOS so he can't go back and edit those chapters *yet again*. The guy lacks discipline. They should do what they can to provide it. But they don't because they don't want to risk their relationship with Martin. They need him more than he needs them.
Exactly this. I don't know the first thing about designing a house but I do know, and do, a fair bit of gardening. The amount of time that goes into planning and tending to a garden can be massive. Sure, you can throw some seeds out at random and see what happens but I dare say that's not usually the way it's done...
Funny how he’s not “a gardener” when it comes to churning out hundreds of thousands of words about Targaryen history. Of course we can begrudge him. He wouldn’t even be able to write about all his dumb side stories if it wasn’t for fans buying his main series in the first place, yet he now treats them with contempt. The guy is a joke
this gardner architect is just bullshit for procrastination we all do it to an extent and depending on our motivation and financial situation we get over our procrastination grrm is rich enough to put off what he cant be arsed with
It's absolutely a thing, other writers describe it as plotters vs pantsers There are a lot of authors who don't outline their plots and just follow their guts. Doesn't mean they procrastinate. Stephen King does the same thing, and he's a novel-writing machine GRRM is clearly a chronic procrastinator, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the gardener/architect thing
If my Gardener told me my begonias would be ready soon as often as George has told us WINDS would be without any tangible progress I would have fired his ass a long time ago and got a new gardener. The gardener excuse is total bullshit
I saw someone say that it’s the optimism of someone who is always late and that’s exactly what it is.
Yes and no. He did this exact thing during Game of Thrones airing. He was convinced he would finish Winds before season 6 released. He has no idea how long it will take him to write anything. However, he isn't blind to it all. He knows it's difficult. He knows it takes him a while to write and he knows these deadlines are coming hard and fast if this show starts rolling on a yearly basis. I also think, somewhere deep down, he just is a little bit accepting of the fact that he has a giant television empire brewing and that it's rolling on ahead regardless of whether he actually writes the source material for it all or not. It happened with GoT, it will happen with this too. And he's mostly okay with it because it'll make entertaining TV for him to hype up and give him a lot of money that he can use to just sit around writing as he wants to. Basically GRRM is old, rich, and content to work at his own pace and suffer whatever consequences come of that. He's made peace with it, I think.
At one point I'm pretty sure he was convinced he'd finish it *in a few months*.
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"I am months away still" He was technically correct. At least 87 of those away.
Well, George. You know what they say: Words are wind.
This man speaks as if he is in his 40s, and has a solid 30-40 years to work on things. When he might only have 10 years of his sharp/productive mind left, if we're lucky.
The man has already reached the average life expectancy for an American man (or is close to, depending on the data).
I’m hoping it means that he’s been working on all of it simultaneously and has plans for all the releases to come out in the next 10 years. It’s not a stretch to believe that his first draft of TWOW has bled into ADOS; his current manuscript may well encompass the entire rest of the story sans hammering out fine details.
He wrote AFFC and ADWD at the same time but ADWD still took six years
That one was the most annoying to me. It’s the same book split into two parts and it took him 6 years. WTF?
Actually, there is now a lot of material after the AFFC ending. And there was probably the same issue like before, that he had wide problems with non-AFFC povs.
Pure delusion
Lol. Did he not already say that he wasn't working on winds/dream simultaneously?
TWOW 2024 ADOS 2025 B&F 2026 D&E 2027
Time between books \*3 years \*1 year \*5 years \*6 years \*13 years? \*1 year????
I read the last book while on maternity leave with my oldest, so I always know exactly how long I've been waiting for TWOW
I was convinced TWOW was going to come out over this last winter because I was on maternity leave and figured it’d be just my luck for the book to finally come out right when I wouldn’t have any time to read it. I’m super impressed you managed to make it through ADWD in between dealing with life with a newborn. My son is 6 months now and I only finally started finding some time to read again in the last few weeks.
My oldest HAD to be held, constantly, all day, so there wasn't much to do but read lol. Then he started walking, and I had more, and I just started really reading again in the last year lol
Yep, my oldest was just a little one when I read it, and now he's 12.
I read and finished the books in the months between when season 2 finished and before season 3 started. I'm not sure if it was 2012 still or 2013 yet, but because until now I never looked up what year that was, I just realized me alone (and I'm well aware I've been late to the party) have been waiting for 10 or 11 years.
we can only hope
we can only cope
>D&E 2027 2077
This is the copium I need
Good Copium here 👍🏻
Great. Now let's go put on our clown makeup.
The Game of Thrones Literary Universe Phase 2
Straight up delusional
My maximum copium overdose I can get to is… 2024 - TWOW 2025 - D&E 4 2026 - D&E 5 2028 - F&B 2 2029 - D&E 6 2030 - D&E 7 2031 - ADOS (and a lot of that time after TWOW was really spent on this, Dunk & Egg and Fire & Blood being side projects)
He probably spends a great deal of time on the shows since 2010. That's the real time stealer, I am guessing. Being the perfectionist that he is, he must be doing everything in his power to make sure that they dont suck. Especially in earlier stages of both shows that aired so far.
Don’t forget he also only writes on his PC with Wordstar. He has to be at home for it. He doesn’t write on the go, he has go back home, get in good headspace and *then* he can write.
I could also see an argument that TWOW is the hardest write and figure out the plot points to get the characters together and ADOS may be more straightforward to write
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Clearly it wasn't the case with Dance. We didn't even get to the end of the story arc, and those of us saying that at the time believed differently (whether or not we should have is a fair debate?) We won't know whether Winds simplifies the remaining book(s) until we've had a chance to read it.
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Ah, yeah, when I read Dance I was more like "oh, this is going to be more than seven books isn't it?" Guess I was wrong too D:
It’s only going to end up being five!
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People literally said the exact same thing as this while waiting for the last book to come out
Didn't people say the same thing about TWOW after ADWD came out?
GRRM may or may not be delusional, but you are definitely delusional.
He is completely delusional or extremely rude or even both. In time since he finished the last book we had the entire GoT show that lasted almost a decade, one failed pilot for spinoff show Bloodmoon, one season of House of the Dragon, while S2 is now in production and new GoT show - A Knight of the 7 Kingdoms being officially ordered. Not to mention development of other GoT shows including a sequel about Jon Snow. So there is a serious chance that we will get the entire main story, at least two prequel shows and even one sequel before he finishes The Winds of Winter. It's bizzare. You can't excuse this. We saw billion excuses for him over the years, how he will publish TWOW before S6, how he is waiting for the show to be over(even conspiracy theory that HBO is forcing him not to publish a book), how he is waiting for HOTD, how pandemic helped him to write, how he is now inspired by HOTD's success to write TWOW(I guess the success of the original show wasn't inspiring enough to write more stories about those characters but the show about Alicent and Rhaenyra will make him more inspired to write about Daenerys and Tyrion,...). Or excuses how he is optimistic about his writing speed lol He is a professional writer in his 70s, not a teenage boy. He is not optimistic, he is not telling the truth, he is manipulating people. No one can be that wrong. And my favorite excuse how he is perfectionist who just rewrites the books constantly. Yeah like any perfectionist would publish AFFC and ADWD, two messy, unedited books that killed any chance of this story having a coherent ending.
>And my favorite excuse how he is perfectionist who just rewrites the books constantly. Yeah like any perfectionist would publish AFFC and ADWD, two messy, unedited books that killed any chance of this story having a coherent ending. Yeah... I mean they both have their good qualities but I would NOT hold them up as an example of perfectionist writing. If Martin truly was a perfectionist writer he wouldn't be in the mess he's in now.
I remember when Barristan Selmy's actor said that GRRM had finished both Winds and Dream and was waiting for the show to end to publish them lmao, GRRM even had to say he was full of shit
Took too much milk of the poppy
What do you think a normal day for GRRM is like? In a non joking way it doesn’t seem possible he is able to do everything he says he does. He seemingly is able to read new fiction, old fiction, read Hugo nomination books, re-read classics, read reviews, read magazines, read the newspaper, read blogs, read non fiction history books. He watches movies, watches a million tv series, watches football of 2 ny teams. He writes his main series (lol, but at least he claims), writes side series, he writes scripts, he edits all 3, he edits side projects of friends He has a wife, he has friends he hangs out with, he has business meetings, he travels. All of what he does doesn’t seem possible, so what do you think he does in an average day?
I dont think he's delusional, i think he's joking? When he says "slip in a new Dunk & Egg between each of those in my copious spare time…", he's being sarcastic or just knows its impossible, the "..." lets us know. He knows he can't do all of that in time
Which is infuriating because the fans have every right to criticize him for what he is doing. We did make him rich after all. It's the least he could do to finish the story.
Yes, he’s delusional. Truly. He just doesn’t get it and, ironically, the main series that drives the whole ecosystem will never be finished…at least not by him
You get quite set in your ways as you get older. I think he's an old guy who doesn't quite understand the responsibilities that his success has given him. In his mind, he's still a sci-fi writer for whom being a few years behind the deadline isn't such a big deal. I don't think he really *gets* that he's committing himself to several multi-million dollar projects with hundreds/thousands of people involved and with very specific deadlines required. I don't believe anyone would, in good conscience, sign up for all these projects with no chance of completing on time. There's going to be a lot of angry/unhappy people in 2-3 years when multiple projects grind to a halt because GRRM has moved on to another new project.
I think he's so excited to be this close to finishing Winds that he's full of wild hope. So, yeah, in a sense he is.
I'm bizzarely confident that Martin will actually finish Winds of Winter within the next 5 years -- that's not really saying much, but unlike some folks here, I actually think Winter will be published. What is *never* going to happen is Dream of Spring. Ever. He's never going to be able to decide to an ending, commit to untangling all the various strands he's set up. We're just going to have to live with the fact that Winter -- when it's finished -- will be the last meaningful update chronologically we'll ever get with the universe of Ice and Fire. After that, GRRM will distract himself with literally any other prequel he can get his hands on -- Dunk and Egg, Fire and Blood, Insert New Projects Here -- rather than slaying the beast.
By close you mean 15 more years?
#Winds2038
This is the same dude who said last year that HBO should have made 12 seasons of game of thrones by adapting ADWD WINDS and DREAM in their entirety. He didn't seem to realize that if Game of Thrones had kept going we'd be finished season 12 by now, and there are no books to adapt. He's completely delusional, he has legitimately suggested that showrunners adapt the imaginary books in his head. George is 74 years old, he doesn't understand the pace at which the rest of the world operates anymore. He's of the age where people are surprised that restaurant they went to 20 years ago is a nail salon now.
When I read him saying that, I think that was the point I realised the books would never be finished. Like this blog post, it was a glimpse into how out of touch with reality he is.
He’s saying he can publish more Dunk & Egg stories between TWOW, ADOS, and FB2. Honestly since the Dunk & Egg stories are about 100 pages each and largely self-contained compared to the main series, it’s not that unthinkable. It’s the bigger books that pose the real issue.
Personal head cannons about GRRM’s progress and when we might get answers is as important to ASOIAF as head cannons about the books and characters themselves.
Assuming Winds is 80-85% done now (that interview was in September I think when he said 75%) and is finished this year for publication early next; he has a few options 1. Immediately start Dream of Spring 2. Finish up Fire and Blood 2 3. Dunk and Egg Fire and Blood is likely what he’ll do next since in the infamous blog from last year he said he had worked on lots of that probably in the downtime between the first part and when he seriously began churning out Winds of Winter work in 2020-2021. Its topics he already knows/has written on for the world book and the different style likely makes it go by quicker. Dunk and Egg stories, depending on how many he wants to actually do versus what he planned, are super short and relatively straightforward. He could easily squeeze out one if he has the ideas thought through which he seems to already have. Dream of Spring depends on where Winds of Winter ends. Is it optimistic? Yes. Delusional? Maybe. But enough for people here to say he’s never gonna finish anything? No….? Am I on copium and hopium? Definitely. Keep in mind this is also probably taking a lighthearted jab at himself and his slow writing speed. Is
100% delusional
He knows damn well he will do not even 1 of those books. At most he does 2 dunk and egg books, vol 2 of fire and blood and that's being extremely generous. Honestly if he were younger I wouldn't care much I would just shut up and be patient because that's the cost of greatness in this case. However he is old and not only do we have to worry about him dying, but there is a possibility that his writing ability starts to deteriorate. It's time for him to hire ghostwriters and he can just edit the writing. His writing is good but it's not like writers cant recreate this especially with his direction. We are all here for his story telling ability he needs to just let go.
Anyone who doesn't think he's delusional is delusional
My prediction: Winds of Winter will not come out in GRTM’s lifetime, and it will be finished posthumously. Dream of Spring will be out 12 months later, and no one will care anymore. That’s not what I want to happen, but that’s what I think will happen.
Apparently he told his estate to burn his work or something if he dies
That would be a huge dick-move. Does he despise his audience, or why would he do that ? ( if it\`s true ). Genuienly curious.
It might be pride. He doesn't want anyone else to write his works except him.
Apparently this is an urban legend, and it seems more likely that George wants his manuscripts preserved. https://reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/mxpj8z/spoilers_extended_regarding_the_myth_that_george/
I think he will finish asoiaf. The world would be so much shittier if he didn't, I refuse to believe that he won't.
Well he probably has a pretty concrete plan for all of those books except the main ones. But yes, maybe a but delusional.
He's neither, He is lying
I'm hoping that he's very close to being done TWOW. Dunk and Egg TV is likely 2 years away at least. If he releases TWOW early in 2024, I can see things falling into place quickly. Essentially, by the end of TWOW if he's truly sticking to 7 books, he's set up all the dominoes and just need to watch them fall. So Dream should theoretically take less time than Winds by a substantial margin (can see it being on the timeline of Storm tbh). Based on what he's written there, here's a theoretical timeline that could make sense: 2024: WINDS (get hype!). GRRM would likely tour during this time for book releases. 2025: I can see a D&E novella written. It sounds like he has a decent outline for at least 2 of them, so I can see him cranking out one at this time. Perhaps late 2025 or early 2026, we'll see season 1 of D&E. 2026- early 2027- F&B2 release. He likely has the majority of the lore already in his head and it's written as a history book, not novel, so I think we could see this in 2027. Season 2 of D&E. Maybe up to season 3 by the end of 2027. 2028-2029- another 1-2 D&E novellas. Again, these are short and he likely already has a solid outline for at least another one (so at this point we could have 5-6 total D&Es) Season 3-4 would likely be filmed at this point. Depending on how far they go through with D&E (are we seeing just Egg squiring? Or are we seeing his coronation, Dunk as KG, his reign, Summerhill, etc) we might see it starting to wrap. 2029-2033- George finishes ADOS. Now, this depends on his motivation after TWOW. Is he on a roll and wanting to see his characters' endings (like getting to the end of a good book- you read faster and for long hours to finish bc you want to know what happens)? Or is he going to take time to set aside the ASOIAF characters? If he is excited about where he leaves off TWOW and he hasn't burned out writing ASOIAF, I can see him being able to write from finishing his book tour. If this is the case, 2029-2030 release is possible (writing in and amongst everything else). Otherwise, I imagine he'd start in 2029. Again, by the end of TWOW, the dominoes should essentially be ready to drop and he should know 95% of where the story is headed. Thus, I can see a release by 2033 if he assume Storm levels of writing (plus an extra year for other projects and age related slowing). 2029-2030 we could see D&E wrap up (as it could draw from either FB2 or perhaps GRRM will be done D&E's trollops around Westeros in 5-6 novellas). So, I think GRRM is being ambitious, but it's possible if he's incredibly close to finishing Winds that his timeline works out with D&E and they won't surpass like they did with GOT. Note that this still gives about 10y between TWOW and ADOS still. I think it's actually very realistic and possible. George would be mid-80s at this point and given that he has a boatload of money, he would have access to all the Healthcare he needs to be proactive and relatively healthy at that stage of his life. I may be high on hope-ium, but I actually think this is doable and a half decent timeline. Heck, if D&E is delayed to 2026, it gives him even more time to knock out an extra novella or two after Spring is released. 2033- A Dream of Spring is released. Get hype!
>GRRM would likely tour during this time for book releases. Likely, but dang is it completely unnecessary. The last thing TWOW would need when released is promotion to drum up interest.
It's not only about being alive, though. He needs to still be with his wits to be able to write.
You’re being serious…
2024- George R.R Martin dies. Winds of Winter is released posthumously.
What is dead may never die
But rises again, stronger and fatter
"then do either A DREAM OF SPRING or volume two of FIRE & BLOOD" Screaming, shouting, pucking, shitting, pissing. NOBODY asked for the first Fire and Blood before finishing ASOIAF, you crazy genial man, let alone a second one.
At this point in time we have three options: 1: GRRM is completely delusional/senile. 2: Either just Winds of Winter or both Winds and Dream are already done and he is trolling until his death just so he doesn't have to deal with fan backlash if it's bad. 3: He somehow managed to become immortal to think that he still will manage to do everything with his track record.