The Complete Winds of Winter Resource

[ChillyPolly]

It may not be self-evident to people who have not spent over a decade studying the process, but it is precedented. This is exactly how GRRM has always worked since he started writing the series. Whenever he gives a progress report, it only includes the finished pages and the rough stuff is left out, because it's value is unknown (it might need 5 minutes to fix up into a finished chapter or 5 months). If he comments on roughs or partials, he specifically notes that this is the case.

You are confusing your terms as to types of page count. A page count that consists of finished, or "more or less finished" chapters is NOT the same thing as a page count consisting of chapters submitted to the editor. They are different categories.

This confusion is essential to our disagreement. I am not arguing that the "200 pages in a more or less finished state" that he referred to in July 2012 were not really finished. I am arguing that they were NOT all submitted to his editor. Hence, the 168 pages of submitted material as of July, 2014 represented an increase in the total from 100 to 168 SUBMITTED pages. That he has FINISHED chapters in addition to whatever was submitted at various points is something I had never denied.

If you are implying that he never gives page counts to his fans unless he gives the material to his editor first, you are demonstrably wrong. Compare the "partials" (partial manuscripts) listed in his "Talking about the Dance" Not-A-Blog as submitted to his editor, with the running page counts occasionally released on his Not-A-Blog. For instance, in September 2009 he submitted to his editor a "partial" manuscript of 998 pages (per "Talking about the Dance" Not-A-Blog 5/19/11). Next, on his Oct. 6, 2009 Not-A-Blog, he announces to his fans that he has "passed the 1100 page ... mark" in completed chapters. Next, in January 2010 [per his 5/19/11 Talking About the Dance Not-A-Blog], he submits a partial manuscript of 1038 pages. Did he lose 63 pages? No. More likely, we are comparing applies and oranges. More likely, some of the 1100 pages he told his fans about in October, were still held back (for whatever reason) when he submitted a partial to his editor the following January.

Similarly, in February 8, 2010 (shortly after delivering 1038 pages to his editor the prior month) he announces to his fans on his Not-A-Blog that he has reached "1205 pages". On 2/15/2010, he announces "1261 pages and counting". On 3/2/2010 he announces "I hit page 1311 yesterday". But his next partial manuscript delivered to his editor, in June, 2010 consists of only 1028 pages; a net loss of 10 pages since his last submission. The 283-page difference between 1311 and 1028 is only partially explained by the interim bumping to WINDS of two Arianne chapters and perhaps an Arya chapter.

In March 2011 he submits his "final partial" to his editor, consisting of 1571 pages. On March 27, 2011 he announces to his fans that he has passed 1600 pages. This is clearly not material submitted to his editor, because the last partial was his "final partial", and because his next submission is the full manuscript, consisting of 1510 pages (cut down from maybe 1590 pages since roughly 80 were lost by editing to tighten the text) with a balance of "nearly 1700 pages" - or roughly 100 pages (much of it unfinished) being bumped to WINDS.

You again confuse and conflate terms and categories, when you assume that a rule that can (to some extent) be applied when GRRM gives page counts, can also be applied when he gives percentage estimates. Problem is, GRRM almost never gives such percentage estimates. The example we are arguing is almost (with maybe one other exception) the only example. And he gave it (reluctantly, hesitantly, and with disclaimers of uncertainty) only because he was ambushed by a reporter who explicitly asked for an answer in percentage terms. So there is simply no rule that applies to percentage estimates. Sorry.

Finally, you make an appeal to inappropriate authority - your own. I too have studied the evidence. If it is really true that you understand the evidence better than I do, you may prove it by arguing the evidence. In the meantime, don't talk down to me, please.

I agree that the primary problem with these discussions is that, unlike ADWD, GRRM is not providing regular enough updates to say anything with overwhelming certainty. However, your position seems to be unwarrantedly pessimistic (10% of the book done in two years) when the alternative (25% done in two years) would still result in TWoW taking two years longer to complete than even ADWD, which is frankly bad enough.

This is an appeal to emotion. Just because we as fans have an emotional need to believe he is making a certain level of progress in order to maintain our enthusiasm, does not mean it MUST be true.

Nor is the current situation entirely unprecedented. At roughly the 3-year mark following FEAST, GRRM had submitted only about 680 pages of DANCE to his editor, an increase of roughly 150 pages over what was bumped from FEAST. I'm sure if some evidence of this possibility had been raised at the time, you would have insisted it was "too pessimistic". You would insist it would take GRRM well over a decade to finish, at that rate, and THAT CAN'T BE TRUE. But why can't it be true? It will be done when it's done, and he's not our bitch and he owes us nothing anyway. That's the official line, from GRRM and Mr. Gaiman, right?

Fortunately, it wasn't true, for GRRM's rate of writing picked up considerably thereafter. It took him another 2.5 years, and not another 20, to reach the roughly 1571 (plus an additional 100 bumped to WINDS) that he submitted to his editor in early March. And the same could happen with WINDS.

Admittedly, the current situation is in some ways worse than the 3 year mark post FEAST. We have, as of the 3 year mark, only 168 submitted pages of the next book instead of 680, and only 60 pages of progress instead of 150. But that by itself does not make the situation hard to believe, given what we know: public complaints by GRRM about HBO-related duties and other side projects eating into his time, together with rumors that he wrote more than 1000 pages of background material for the World Book, etc. etc.

I don't either, and without more optimistic news emerging from Team GRRM soon, I can't see 2016 being particularly viable either, which means he will be close to matching the wait for ADWD (5 years, 9 months). In fact, he matches that if TWoW isn't out by April 2017.

I'm more pessimistic, in that if I were a betting parrot, I would bet on a later date. But sure, it COULD happen by April 2017, or even sooner.

More distressingly, GRRM started making much more optimistic noises about TWoW being done 18 months or so out from publication, and there are few indications of that yet.

I have never heard these hopeful noises you're referring to.

OTOH, George has said he would not be providing regular updates for this book, and he has stuck by that, which means everything could still be up in the air.

I very much doubt he will keep everything a secret until Book 6 is near release. He has never done anything like that before. And it is probably not good for book sales. More likely, he will keep mum until he has reasonably good news to report. But he will probably not report what a pessimist like me would consider good news, because that would disappoint the majority of his fans, who invariably salivate for publication within the year.

But if he does choose to keep his progress a secret, that is his right. The inevitable result is that we will not know how much progress he has made, or WHETHER he has made any progress at all, until he announces it is finished.

It does not give you a license to say he has 370 pages confirmed complete, when he has confirmed no such thing. If we talk about what is confirmed we should stick to what is confirmed. All that is confirmed is the following, in 3 different categories:

400 pages total including extremely rough material, as of July, 2012; which includes ...

200 pages of "more or less finished" material, as of July, 2012, which probably includes ...

168 pages of SUBMITTED chapters, as of June, 2014.

And that's where it stands, until the next update. And if that update is "It's done", then so be it.

[ChillyPolly]

I'd also heard through the grapevine that GRRM met with Anne Groell in NYC during the 92Y livestream in October 2014. So, there exists the potential that a doc drop-off occurred in October 2014 -- this would be well-after her suvudu interview in May 2014. (If that's baseless rumor-mongering, speculation, let me know, and I'll delete this para)

It's pretty baseless. I'm sure GRRM usually submits documents to Anne electronically, and does not need to personally journey to NYC to do it.

But it is true that our submitted page count of 168 is only current up to June 2014. George could have submitted additional material at ANY TIME after that point, and not merely in October.

[ChillyPolly]

(Including a seemingly significant re-write in 2009-2010 as page counts shifted pretty dramatically (

1261 MS pages in Feb 2010, cuts/re-writes to 1028 (Damphair, Sansa, Arianne & Arya cut to TWOW) in June 2010

You are making the mistake of conflating different catagories of page count. "finished", and "submitted" are not necessarily the same.

GRRM reached 1311 pages [finished] in March 2010. This count already did not include the Sansa chapter, which was bumped out a year earlier.

In June 2010 he submits a partial manuscript of 1028 [submitted] to his editor. The loss of 283 pages since March is only partially explained by the recent loss of 2 Arianne chapters (bumped to Winds). Arya may also have been lost during this period, but we do not know this. At most, lost chapters amount to about 60 pages. Where did the other 223 pages go? The simple answer is that he did not "submit" everything he had "finished".

At the end of July, he announces he has decided to bump Aeron as well.

There is no evidence of significant cuts/rewrites other than the 2-3 chapters mentioned. Nor is this the only such "discrepancy", as I explained above in my last post to Werthead. It is not that he is constantly losing material, just that he does not instantly or automatically submit to his editor everything he has "finished".

It is the same with Winds. We have an earlier page count of 200 [finished] plus a later page count of 168 [submitted]. It is not as though he lost material. It is just that he never "submitted" the entire 200 pages that he "finished".

Of course, it is also theoretically possible that he lost material to cuts and rewrites. Such things have happened. But even if that could be so, that's merely another reason why we should not make the mistake of saying "He cannot possibly have LOST material, so obviously be have to add the two totals together and get a grand total of 368 finished, submitted pages." That is desperate wishful thinking run amok. Anne Groell did not say she had 368 pages; she said she had 168 pages.

[mormont]

People: this thread is intended to be a factual summary of the current information about TWOW. It is not intended to be a place to debate an unknowable quantity, ie the number of pages GRRM may or may not have completed or partially completed, or to critique each other's techniques for estimating said unknowable quantity.

The thread is for facts, not estimates, opinions, forecasts or guesses, whether pessimistic or optimistic. You're each entitled to have those but leave them out of this thread, OK?

[ChillyPolly]

People: this thread is intended to be a factual summary of the current information about TWOW. It is not intended to be a place to debate an unknowable quantity, ie the number of pages GRRM may or may not have completed or partially completed, or to critique each other's techniques for estimating said unknowable quantity.

The thread is for facts, not estimates, opinions, forecasts or guesses, whether pessimistic or optimistic. You're each entitled to have those but leave them out of this thread, OK?

I have no idea what this warning means. What may be considered as "factual" or not, is precisely what we have been debating. Clarification please!

I hope you're not saying that when Werthead and BryndenBFish say "x is fact" (in posts that are pinned by the mods), ChillyPolly is not allowed to disagree and say "No, x is not fact". If x is truly fact, it ought to be able to survive challenge in the context of free debate.

[mormont]

I have no idea what this warning means. What may be considered as "factual" or not, is precisely what we have been debating. Clarification please!

I think it's perfectly clear. If you want to argue about what should be considered factual, take it to another thread. That applies as much to Wert as it does to you.

The intention in pinning this thread is to provide clear, undisputed factual information about TWOW in one easily accessible place. That intention is not served by the thread turning into an argument about who is being optimistic and who is being pessimistic.

[ChillyPolly]

A suggestion to the OP. Instead of linking (at the 5th bullet under "Writing Process") to the fake Adria's News mega-interview, which can be found here:

http://www.adriasnews.com/2012/10/george-r-r-martin-interview.html?spref=tw

you might instead want to go straight to the source, and get GRRM's actual words. The actual words in question are found in the July 18, 2012 Celsius 232 Press Conference, which can be found here:

http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2012/07/

GRRM's actual words can be found at the 8:50 mark on the audio.

It it hard to hear at points, but transcribes roughly as follows:

"I already have a couple of hundred pages in a more-or-less finished state of book 6 - which is called the Winds of Winter. I have probably an equal amount of that is written, but in a very first draft crude form that's going to need a lot of work and revision before it's ready for publication. That being said, these are very large books - the last one was fifteen hundred pages long in manuscript, so, I have hundreds, hundreds ...?... pages to write. And hopefully when I get back from all this traveling ...?... when I get to it; but it's still going to take a few years. The book is not going to be out - or delivered - this year, or perhaps even next year. The year after that? That would be my hope. But I've wanted to be very wary of making predictions, because I'm not very good at forecasting how long its going to take me to ...?... these books. Ultimately, I'm going to be judged by the quality of the series when its done; not by how quickly I delivered it or whether I met all my deadlines ...?... publication dates, so in that sense this is my literary ...?...; and I'm making sure I do it to the best of my capability."

[Werthead]

Somewhat unrelated to this discussion: Wert, I ran across an old thread here on Westeros that indicated that you would have a character based on you in TWOW, and I wondered whether that was true or not.

It was true at one point, I'm not sure if it is now. I believe it was in the second Arianne chapter, one of the characters she meets (either one of the escorts sent out by the Golden Company, or one of her own companions) was "Ser Addam of House Whitehead" or something like that. Later on when that chapter was read at another con, the names had changed (either that or I'm completely misremembering). I did point out to George that if he named a character after me in the book, obviously that would be awesome but then I wouldn't be able to review it impartially, and of course my review would be critical to TWoW's sales :P :D So he may have changed it.

I have never heard these hopeful noises you're referring to.

That was an error, that was supposed to be a reference to ADWD, not TWoW.

[ChillyPolly]

IThat was an error, that was supposed to be a reference to ADWD, not TWoW.

Ah! Sorry. Yes, I see what you were saying.

[BryndenBFish]

It was true at one point, I'm not sure if it is now. I believe it was in the second Arianne chapter, one of the characters she meets (either one of the escorts sent out by the Golden Company, or one of her own companions) was "Ser Addam of House Whitehead" or something like that. Later on when that chapter was read at another con, the names had changed (either that or I'm completely misremembering). I did point out to George that if he named a character after me in the book, obviously that would be awesome but then I wouldn't be able to review it impartially, and of course my review would be critical to TWoW's sales :P :D So he may have changed it.

That was an error, that was supposed to be a reference to ADWD, not TWoW.

Well, if you do get confirmation from GRRM that you're in TWOW, let me know! I'll add it onto the plot information that GRRM has confirmed about TWOW.

A suggestion to the OP. Instead of linking (at the 5th bullet under "Writing Process") to the fake Adria's News mega-interview, which can be found here:

http://www.adriasnews.com/2012/10/george-r-r-martin-interview.html?spref=tw

you might instead want to go straight to the source, and get GRRM's actual words. The actual words in question are found in the July 18, 2012 Celsius 232 Press Conference, which can be found here:

http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Month/2012/07/

GRRM's actual words can be found at the 8:50 mark on the audio.

It it hard to hear at points, but transcribes roughly as follows:

Good copy. I'll edit to reflect this a little bit later my time.

Thanks again for the help. And Mormont, sorry to get into the editorializing/debating bit on TWOW's progress.

[BryndenBFish]

Jane Johnson interview with the Guardian:

However, Johnson confirmed that The Winds of Winter, the next novel in the series that has been filmed by HBO as A Game of Thrones, is not in this year’s schedule. “I have no information on likely delivery,” she said. “These are increasingly complex books and require immense amounts of concentration to write. Fans really ought to appreciate that the length of these monsters is equivalent to two or three novels by other writers.”

[Werthead]

The average length of a novel is about 100,000 words, so it's actually more like four novels (well, for ASoS and ADWD anyway) :)

[Vengeance]

Well there we have it - pretty definitive confirmation that the final act of Martin's magnum opus, decades in the making, will be spoiled by a half-hearted TV adaptation. Rather crushing for those fans who've been around since long before the show. :frown5:

I do wonder how much time this author actually spend writing - he must go months penning barely a word. Even if he limited himself to 500 words a day, he would have finished Winds long ago...

[Old Ida]

Well there we have it - pretty definitive confirmation that the final act of Martin's magnum opus, decades in the making, will be spoiled by a half-hearted TV adaptation. Rather crushing for those fans who've been around since long before the show. :frown5:

I do wonder how much time this author actually spend writing - he must go months penning barely a word. Even if he limited himself to 500 words a day, he would have finished Winds long ago...

Who can tell when the painter has drawn his last stroke or an author written his final word?

Only when the work go out of their hands. They take the time they need to do so IMO

[Werthead]

Note: Johnson said the book is not on the schedule for 2015, just like how ASoS wasn't on the 2000 schedule in January of that year, or how AFFC wasn't on the 2005 schedule in January of that year either.

It's not very likely (based on current information) that novel will come out in 2015. It's certainly not impossible.

[BryndenBFish]

The average length of a novel is about 100,000 words, so it's actually more like four novels (well, for ASoS and ADWD anyway) :)

Love the quote from Anne Groell from back when ADWD came out:

What I found out was that George was writing a highly-respectable 83,000 word novel a year–which is really nothing to sneer about.

[Mel_Rose]

BryndenBFish,

thank you for collecting all this info in one handy post :)

[BryndenBFish]

In a skype Q&A with Croatian fans, GRRM said that we'd find out where whores go & we'll be seeing Garlan & Willas Tyrell "pretty soon":

[Ser Fingerbones]

GRRM said that we'd find out where whores go & we'll be seeing Garland & Willas Tyrell "pretty soon": http://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2uf9kc/spoilers_all_so_last_week_i_got_to_talk_to_grrm/

Can't help but wonder if that 'pretty soon' means relative to the books release (as in soon), the point after Dance's end or (my least favourite) George will write their scenes soon..

Perhaps they'll be visiting the citadel when the Greyjoys attack Oldtown, where Sam will meet them. Can't see them returning to KL with the recent invasions. Alternatively, maybe Willas will head to the Stormlands to meet Aegon.

[Mithras]

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is coming this year in October.

I think we can expect TWoW in 2016.