The Ultimate Winds of Winter Resource

[The Fattest Leech]

15 hours ago, Ser Wun Wun said:

George just said on his blog that he thinks he can get Winds out in 2017:  Link

So he definitely hedges the statement...but any mention of Winds in 2017 is better than nothing at this point.  

I saw this when he posted it. If one reads the comment he was responding to, then you can see how sarcastic he was being. He basically just listed everything the asker was "requesting" with one or two additions. 

Do I think he is finished? No. 

Do I think he is close to finishing? Hard to say, but I agree he had a good head start with the moved ADWD chapters, however, probably no. 

I will wait for an excellent book, but updates would be the donut to my coffee. 

7 hours ago, Faint said:

Hey, speak for yourself, I miss his bullshit excuses.

I was kind of hoping we would get the Winterfell Quandry or the Volantis Clusterfuck. 

[Free Northman Reborn]

I must say, I look back at stuff that I was passionate about 5 years ago, or dare I say it, 10 years ago, and it is remarkable how my interests have moved on. I really don't know how one maintains your passion and enthusiasm for something started 25 years ago. I'm sure he's had plenty of other writing ideas since the day he visualized the wolf pups in the snow. But now he is stuck in this Ice and Fire world, probably for the rest of his writing career.

From that perspective, it is kind of sad.

[Wayward Sand Star]

2 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

It utterly boggles the mind. I don't have words anymore to describe the situation.

How about the following, then: he's not contractually bound to you. 

7 minutes ago, The Fattest Leech said:

I saw this when he posted it. If one reads the comment he was responding to, then you can see how sarcastic he was being. He basically just listed everything the asker was "requesting" with one or two additions. 

Do I think he is finished? No. 

Do I think he is close to finishing? Hard to say, but I agree he had a good head start with the moved ADWD chapters, however, probably no. 

I will wait for an excellent book, but updates would be the donut to my coffee. 

Guessing at possible release dates has become a risky business. That said, I think the most telling piece of evidence thus far has been clearing his schedule for the rest of 2017, until WoW is done. I'm not sure what it actually tells us (about his progress), mind you, but it is telling nonetheless!

[Wayward Sand Star]

5 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I must say, I look back at stuff that I was passionate about 5 years ago, or dare I say it, 10 years ago, and it is remarkable how my interests have moved on. I really don't know how one maintains your passion and enthusiasm for something started 25 years ago. I'm sure he's had plenty of other writing ideas since the day he visualized the wolf pups in the snow. But now he is stuck in this Ice and Fire world, probably for the rest of his writing career.

From that perspective, it is kind of sad.

Or glorious. That's art for you.

[Consigliere]

It's nice that Martin has given an update. I'm going to remain positive and say that we will see the book this year.

[Cas Stark]

9 hours ago, Faint said:

In some ways, it means it has been at lot worse. You have to take into account that Martin's page count from 2005 to 2008 was actually negative.

If Martin had maintained the writing speed he had from 2008 to 2011, then The Winds of Winter would have been out by mid-2016 at the absolute latest. 

Alas, it seems that Martin cannot even write a chapter a month anymore. 

Yes. Worse.  This is my take also.  I saw nothing in his update to lead me to believe he will have the book out by 2017.  

[SuperMario]

19 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Yes. Worse.  This is my take also.  I saw nothing in his update to lead me to believe he will have the book out by 2017.  

Agreed. His response was a sarcastic attempt to placate the commenter. Whatever the commenter said, he was going to repeat. There was nothing uplifting in his comment. Just more of the same ambiguity except this time he doesn't come across as upset or frustrated. Which to me means he has lost focus and isn't writing as much because it doesn't interest him. By his own account, he attended less cons and traveled less last year to focus on TWOW. Plus, he also has not written for the show in the past two seasons, which he claimed would eat up a month of his entire year. Yet, he seems just as far from completion as he did in 2015, maybe further. So it's pretty clear, he wasn't writing as much as we hoped he would.

[DigUpHerBones]

maybe if half of us on the forum bought his crappy Wild Card series that he pushes and pushes and pushes and pushes, he will finally release Winds?

worth a shot!!!

[SuperMario]

Just now, DigUpHerBones said:

maybe if half of us on the forum bought his crappy Wild Card series that he pushes and pushes and pushes and pushes, he will finally release Winds?

worth a shot!!!

[Cas Stark]

2 minutes ago, SuperMario said:

Agreed. His response was a sarcastic attempt to placate the commenter. Whatever the commenter said, he was going to repeat. There was nothing uplifting in his comment. Just more of the same ambiguity except this time he doesn't come across as upset or frustrated. Which to me means he has lost focus and isn't writing as much because it doesn't interest him. By his own account, he attended less cons and traveled less last year to focus on TWOW. Plus, he also has not written for the show in the past two seasons, which he claimed would eat up a month of his entire year. Yet, he seems just as far from completion as he did in 2015, maybe further. So it's pretty clear, he wasn't writing as much as we hoped he would.

GRRM idea of 'clearing his schedule' is, um, unusual according to me, LOL.  But, yes, his schedule has been 'cleared' for quite some time now, 2 years isn't it, since he quit writing for the show?  And yes again, his affect was totally flat.  He doesn't want to be questioned about Winds and his now so divorced from the idea of trying to get the book out in the near future, that he isn't even frustrated anymore.  He's accepted it.  2019 is when we will see it.  After the show wraps.

[The Bear Who Knocks]

I must say that i'm very surprised at the amount of people and websites that have taken that one line he wrote verbatim. I think it's a clear that from over the years that if he really done he would say so and hes adverse to giving actual date estimates. The tone of his answer repeating what the user said sounds like the usual condescending and trollish manner he tosses at people who bring up Asoiaf up on his blog over Wildcards. 

[Lost Melnibonean]

Since the George sent those 13 chapters to his publisher in 1993, until he publication of The World of Ice and Fire in 2014, the George had published 11 ASOIAF novels, novellas and compenium. That means he has given us an ASOIAF publication about every two years, with the longest gap being the five years between A Feast for Crows 2005 and The Mystery Knight in 2010. Looking at it this way, we are only now just coming due, and I have to wonder whether we might see a tale or three of Dunk and Egg before The Winds of Winter. 

[Faint]

10 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

But Dance had the infamous Meereneese knot that explained it all.

No need to worry.

I am positive we will soon be getting the explanation that he wrote 27 distinct versions of 4 characters converging on Winterfell before he was happy with the end result.  He will call it the "Winterfell Entanglement" and apologetically explain that he could not simply draft a two page outline to figure it out -- he needed to re-write the entire sequence 27 times over, tossing out 104 chapters in the process, in order to get it right. 

[Lord Lannister]

11 hours ago, DigUpHerBones said:

maybe if half of us on the forum bought his crappy Wild Card series that he pushes and pushes and pushes and pushes, he will finally release Winds?

worth a shot!!!

If sales spiked that much, he'd just prioritize a sequel to that.

[WhitewolfStark]

17 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

I must say, I look back at stuff that I was passionate about 5 years ago, or dare I say it, 10 years ago, and it is remarkable how my interests have moved on. I really don't know how one maintains your passion and enthusiasm for something started 25 years ago. I'm sure he's had plenty of other writing ideas since the day he visualized the wolf pups in the snow. But now he is stuck in this Ice and Fire world, probably for the rest of his writing career.

From that perspective, it is kind of sad.

It's the trap that every "successful" artist gets put into if they find financial success during their lifetime. It's a rather common theme--that the thing they get popular for is the thing that the crowd demands more and more of, restricting them to that one expression if the artist wants to continue to be successful.

Long Day's Journey into Night is a semi-fictionalized account of Eugene O'Neill's family drama. The stand-in for Eugene O'Neill's father is a popular actor who made a particular character popular on the stage and found financial success repeating it to the point where he can no longer play any role outside of that character as an actor, and as a career.

Further the dread of being "typecast" and a known "character actor" for a certain role is a further expounding of this phenomenon from an actor's POV.

Shakespeare fell into that lull himself when he had to churn out comedy after comedy after comedy--turning them into rather formulaic affairs. I think that benefitted him overall in the end though, as it gave him the opportunity to learn the formulae so well that he was able to toy with it in later comedies to the benefit of the theater.

So, while it is a trap a lot of artists can fall into, if they choose to, they can use that trap as a way to climb out of it if they so choose and fight for it.

[Túrin the Turambar]

16 hours ago, Faint said:

No need to worry.

I am positive we will soon be getting the explanation that he wrote 27 distinct versions of 4 characters converging on Winterfell before he was happy with the end result.  He will call it the "Winterfell Entanglement" and apologetically explain that he could not simply draft a two page outline to figure it out -- he needed to re-write the entire sequence 27 times over, tossing out 104 chapters in the process, in order to get it right. 

might be.

so what?

[The Marquis de Leech]

Historically, Martin is a very poor judge of how long his writing will take. As such, it's really a case of the book being out when it's out. 

[SuperMario]

5 hours ago, Túrin the Turambar said:

might be.

so what?

Meaning that an orderly writer who uses outlines with ideas and plot and character flows could get to the same conclusion versus one who writes a few hundred pages only to scrap it and start over. He theoretically scraps ideas because they don't eventually flow with other storylines or there are continuity errors. By planning it out with some outlines for each character, he would save months and months of time instead of going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole to eventually just say fuck it. All writers go through changes and revisions to chapters, but to write hundreds of pages only to scrap it and start over is poor planning, and one of the main reasons we don't and will not have the book for quite some time.

[mormont]

1 hour ago, SuperMario said:

Meaning that an orderly writer who uses outlines with ideas and plot and character flows could get to the same conclusion versus one who writes a few hundred pages only to scrap it and start over.

Yeah. But the conclusion isn't the only goal.

Besides, GRRM has never been that kind of writer at any time in his career: he finds it doesn't work for him, and he's pretty unlikely to make a radical change at this point, so the whole discussion is rather pointless. He doesn't write that way, just the same as he doesn't write in a different prose style or in a different genre.

[Greg B]

I'd been giving him a 50/50 shot to complete this book, with the odds basically nil that he'd finish the series. That's starting to seem excessively optimistic. The project is a huge, massively tangled and knotted ball of twine sitting on his desk, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if he can't even look at it, let alone force himself to plant his ass in the chair for hours a day in an effort to weave it into a coherent narrative again.

At this point, I just hope the defiant insistence that he's an experienced vet and it's no sweat off his balls is for real. If it were making him even half as stressed and depressed as it would make me, I'd hope he would just call it and hand it off to another writer (or shove it in a drawer). Life's too short.