The Winged Griffin

One thing to note here is that he also posted an image of him with a monkey on his back, which he frequently used when he talked about progress on Dance, and then Winds way back in 2009-2013.

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2022/12/23/a-couple-of-rocks/ So it looks like we're gonna go to Casterly Rock at some point in TWOW or ADOS. Not really news, but the fact that he's mentioning and posting about the place in great length when it looks like he's deep into writing Winds is interesting to me. Could it be that he's been writing about CR lately? Possibly in a Cersei chapter? He mentioned having wrapped up a "clutch of chapters" from her POV a few months ago. I am probably reading too much into it though, but I can't help it, copium is too good.

You assume that "working on Winds" automatically means that he's increasing the total number of finalized MPs, which it doesn't. George could be rewriting pages, or laying out the outline of a chapter for example, and he'd still call it "working on the book". We saw during the writing of Dance that he managed to "unwrite" around 100 pages over a year of "working on Dance", but that doesn't mean that he hasn't made progress during that time. When he says he's working on the book and making progress, I believe him. He wouldn't outright lie to his fans and say he's working when he really isn't.

I think he said he could write a novel's worth of chapter for Arya, not necessarily that he had done so by that point. I like to believe he must have a number of Arya chapters done by now, given how he mentioned working on her chapters several times during the pandemic. Maybe she's one of the POVs whose storylines he's wrapped for Winds, besides Tyrion? He mentioned working on Jaime/Brienne a few months ago though, and I suspect their storyline will overlap with hers once she gets in the Riverlands, so who knows...

I personally think that the 1500 pages limit is likely to no longer be relevant anymore, given his most recent quote that he needs to write hundreds of more pages to reach a satisfactory conclusion meaning that he'll continue to write until he reached it. Whether he's already above 1500 pages or not is another question entirely though.

Really if the issue is George trying to fit it in just one book, I don't see why this should in fact be an issue. There's nothing wrong with publishing TWOW in two reasonable parts rather than one huge book. He could just write whatever he wants until he feels satisfied, without worrying about fitting it into a single book, and when he's done, he could just chop it in the middle and call it a day.

Here are two great videos on the topic, and frankly, anything is possible really. AdmiralKird is more focused on wether it can fit one and only one book, whereas In Deep Geek straight up admits that he thinks it's going to be split in two parts.