Jekse

We will likely get the upcoming book. It's next you that will never come out. George hasn't posted anything positive about tWoW progress since the covid pandemic, and he is working on a bunch of side projects at HBO. He's not working on the books, so it's not coming out anytime soon.

Every one of them, as Winds of Winter is never coming out

Yes but you have to consider that these characters were explicitly shown to be dead afterwards. In the case of Catelyn we get Arya's POV through Nymeria, and in the case of Pate we get Sam's POV of seeing Jaqen as Pate. But in the case of Quentyn we get a burnt body, and the Meereen story in ADWD opens with the statement that ''burnt bones prove nothing.'' I don't believe that Quentyn is dead or alive, because GRRM didn't know either. There is a reason he cut away from the action and left it ambiguous, so that he can still change his mind later.

George pushed Dance out the door without finishing it. Don't put this past him.

@Ser Arthurs Dawn @Ninefingers I believe you mean this one: https://grrm.livejournal.com/465247.html

GRRM has too many distractions, what with the new shows and him having to constantly be in contact with the showrunners for HotD S2 and D&E, let alone him going off and working on Wild Cards. The story getting bloated and convoluted really isn't such a big problem. We saw during COVID that he was still able to make great strides with tWoW, in spite of the story's difficulty. It's just that GRRM focuses too much on other projects. For many years I used to be optimistic about Winds' future, but after the past year of blog post I'm pretty confident that we will never see it, at least not from GRRM.

He would still care to appease Cersei though. What makes you think this?

The last time Joffrey tried to impress his dad by killing something (the kitten) he was beaten, so he would not care to appease Robert. Supplying a cat's paw with a dagger is asanine, the dude got sent to get deal with a crippled child, his hands would have served well enough. Also Tyrion is drunk when he deduces this, and our POV characters rarely figure out a mystery correctly, they are almost always wrong.

Don't forget that this move killed Rickon, the then rightful king in the north.

I've opened the heresy thread every couple months for years now and I still don't have any idea what it is you people are actually talking about

It's not a problem at all, both Storm and Dance were split in two for foreign paperback releases. I don't see why Winds would be a different case.

Would he finish part two faster? George is itching to go on a book-tour again, and he didn't write anything for 6 months after the Dance book tour.

What are you basing this on? It was Tyrion's chain that caused the bridge of ships which allowed Stannis to land. And Cersei came up with the wildfire idea.

I believe he finished Dance in April, and it was published in July. So three months, maybe two.

I said nothing about why Barry was added in Meereen, and you're just repeating my point about why he was added as a POV.

I think he will either die off-screen soon after Barristan II or in POV in Barry III. Banners get confused, no clear military hierarchy and him giving 2nd in command to a reckless amateur. Also I don't really see him doing anything much important in the story, keep in mind he was added as an afterthought-POV because GRRM needed someone on the inside of Meereen at the end of Dance

Man the battle of Meereen has so many permutations, moving forces and possibilities it's super difficult to predict anything really. It's also true that all our POV's are on the west side of the battle, anything could happen on the east side, like Lhazareen joining out of nowhere for instance. All I'm really expecting is Dany to lose at least one of her dragons to either Victarion of Quentyn if he's still alive, thus starting a cold-war like standoff. And Barristan dies for sure.

Netherlands.