Unrepentant George R.R. Martin swears The Winds Of Winter is "three-quarters of the way done"
Martin says he's "making progress," just like he's said every few months for literally the last decade
Last year, we casually cruised past the decade anniversary of the publication of George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons, the most recent main-series installment of Martin’s hyper-successful A Song Of Ice And Fire series of books. Which means, of course, that we also cruised past the decade anniversary of Martin promising that said book’s follow-up, The Winds Of Winter, will be out, like, next week, something he’s been saying, with equal conviction, basically any time anyone has asked him across the entire ten years since the last book came out.
Martin is riding high at the moment, with the finale for House Of The Dragon (based on one of those other books he’s been writing during this time, instead of The Winds Of Winter) doing big numbers for a Game Of Thrones-starved HBO. (He’s also got a new book out this week, an illustrated version of the Targaryen history called Rise Of The Dragon.) Hence him showing up on noted fantasy nerd Stephen Colbert’s late-night show last night to promise that, wouldn’t you know it: The Winds Of Winter is three-quarters of the way done!
Assuring fans that he’s “making progress,” Martin shocked those who have been asleep since 2011 by announcing that “it’s going to be a very big book.” Alluding to the structure of his books—which shift between various character perspectives that occasionally directly touch on each other—Martin notes that some of the characters’ stories are completely done, but “Not others. So I have to finish all that weaving. Still gonna take me awhile.”
Martin stopped giving even rough assessments for when the book might come out a few years back, on account of them always turning out to be, let’s say, somewhat less than factually accurate. (He’s also stopped doing readings of in-progress snippets, since a decade of that kind of thing has meant a lot of the written material is already out there in the ether.) While not necessarily granting Colbert’s assertion that, at the current rate, it’ll take him three more years to finish the book, Martin did express one thing with certainty: “We’re going to deliver it, and it’s going to be published, and the next day I’ll get the first tweet asking, ‘Where’s A Dream Of Spring?’”