GRRM’s latest blog post

[Kyll.Ing.]

19 hours ago, Werthead said:

I suspect HotD will do fine, as long as it's not a total disaster quality-wise.

Granted, given how GoT turned out in the end, that is a pretty big if.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

23 minutes ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

Granted, given how GoT turned out in the end, that is a pretty big if.

At the very least, HotD's story has an ending.

[sifth]

24 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

At the very least, HotD's story has an ending.

True, but AGoT’s had actual characters. HofD has to turn historical characters, into actual characters. Someone here once said the characters in the World Book and Fire and Blood, were more like archetypes for real characters. It’s now the HBO’s team to turn these archetypes into fully fleshed out characters.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

Granted, given how GoT turned out in the end, that is a pretty big if.

But none of the GoT creative team are involved. This is a new team setting out to prove themselves, so they are more invested in  making this successful, and they have access to GRRM.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

23 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Like I’ve said before, I’m talking more about the online discourse around HOTD than the viewing numbers. Fandoms are their own animal.

Be that as it may, HotD doesn't need to be a GoT-level hit to be considered successful. I think HBO would be happy even if it did Westworld numbers.

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

Be that as it may, HotD doesn't need to be a GoT-level hit to be considered successful. I think HBO would be happy even if it did Westworld numbers.

Hopefully not current Westworld numbers. The ratings for the current season have been very low.

[BalerionTheCat]

This long post was a welcome change after the ones before: laconic, grudging, verging disrespect. It was a message he still cares about ASoIaF. I was beginning to have doubts...

But the post has nothing new: his gardening, not like the show ... What is worrying me: he is still changing, inventing, rewriting the story. I suppose this will be good when done... if ever done... They're still one big book after.

What is good also, we have more frequent updates. Maybe it will lapse, but he seems to be working hard on it these days. Because the end is in sight?

The podcast, however Tyrion nearly completed, this is great news. Some other PoV nearly finished too. Not all however. Maybe some are even stuck bad. We don't know.

[TheLastWolf]

Wait, I thought he was writing TWoW and ADoS simultaneously...if the penultimate book alone has taken him these many years...

[joppakip]

GRRM just writes and it gets published when it gets published. I have only been a fan for a few years, but in his entire career he has published like 8 novels, five of them being within ASOIAF. He isn't prolific in the way other professional writers are, so I feel like analyzing his updates is extremely hit or miss.

[C.T. Phipps]

I have the feeling is Martin wasn't mono-manically set on Seven books, we would have had 14 books by now as he could get all these extra POVs out of his system.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

5 hours ago, joppakip said:

GRRM just writes and it gets published when it gets published. I have only been a fan for a few years, but in his entire career he has published like 8 novels, five of them being within ASOIAF. He isn't prolific in the way other professional writers are, so I feel like analyzing his updates is extremely hit or miss.

On the other hand, each ASOIAF book is like 10 different books smashed into one, so he is very prolific in that sense.

[BlackLightning]

On 7/14/2022 at 10:59 AM, Lady Rhodes said:

Does anyone have any thoughts on what he may have rethought, rewritten, or restructured?

GRRM once said back after season 5 and right before season 6 that there would be a big plot twist revolving around (or caused by) one of the characters who died in season 5. Barristan, Myrcella, Stannis, Selyse, Jon, etc.

Nobody knows.

That seems to have been abandoned given his statements later.

 

There's no telling.

Basically, I think that the version of Winds that we will get will be completely different from the version we would've gotten back in 2016.

[Castellan]

24 minutes ago, BlackLightning said:

Basically, I think that the version of Winds that we will get will be completely different from the version we would've gotten back in 2016.

This is a bit alarming as I feel with anything - choosing paint colours for your house, for example, you are better off sticking to a sound choice and not going off on tangents you think are "interesting"!

All the fan speculation may make him feel that the later chapters will contain too many reveals (I hope not actual "reveals" bit just that the inferences become more supported) which turn out to be squibs because people have thrashed so many topics to death for years now, but they might have more consistency and give the books better quality for future readers than variations inspired by the show or boredom or whatever.

[kissdbyfire]

On 10/23/2022 at 6:13 PM, BlackLightning said:

GRRM once said back after season 5 and right before season 6 that there would be a big plot twist revolving around (or caused by) one of the characters who died in season 5. Barristan, Myrcella, Stannis, Selyse, Jon, etc.

Nobody knows.

That seems to have been abandoned given his statements later.

I remember Martin saying later on that yes, he had decided to go w/ that twist. Has he said anything different since then? 

[Ibbison from Ibben]

On 10/26/2022 at 10:03 AM, kissdbyfire said:

I remember Martin saying later on that yes, he had decided to go w/ that twist. Has he said anything different since then? 

Checking records ...

The original tease was reported in EW by Hibberd on 2015-04-03

GRRM confirmed he had pulled the trigger on it in the same venue on 2016-02-25.

(Sorry for no links on those.)

In his Time interview on 2017-07-13, he might have implied he had abandoned it.

http://time.com/4791258/game-of-thrones-george-r-r-martin-interview/

Quote

In the case of any of my novels, I know where I’m starting from, I know where I want to end up, more or less. I know some of the big turning points along the way, the stuff I’m building for, but you discover an awful lot along the way. Characters rise up and seem more important, and you get to what you’d thought was going to be a big turning point and… the thing you’d thought about two years ago doesn’t really work as well, so you have a better idea! There’s always that process of discovery for me. I know not all writers work that way, but it’s always been the way I work.

So it's iffy.

[Ibbison from Ibben]

On 10/23/2022 at 4:13 PM, BlackLightning said:

Basically, I think that the version of Winds that we will get will be completely different from the version we would've gotten back in 2016.

I think you're probably right on that.

As of 2015-10-01-GRRM thought he could finish Winds by the end of the year. Then he decided to make some changes.

Here's a quote from his Not-a-Blog post from 2016-01-02. (He wrote a massive 10 part year-in-review post for 2015 on 2016-01-01, but it got eaten. This his his abbreviated version from the next day.) It might be one of the most important documents in ASoIaF history.

Quote

Early August saw me back east for my nephew's wedding and an appearance with the Staten Island Direwolves. I took advantage of the visit to have another sit down with my editors and publishers and told them that I didn't think I could deliver by Halloween. I thought they'd be sick about it... but I have to say, my editors and publishers are great, and they took it with surprising equanimity. (Maybe they knew it before I did). They already had contigencies in place. They had made plans to speed up production. If I could deliver WINDS OF WINTER by the end of the year, they told me, they could still get it our before the end of March.

I was immensely relieved. I had two whole extra months! I could make that, certainly. August was an insane month, too much travel, too many other obligations... but I'd have September, October, and now November and December as well. Once again I was confident I could do it.

Here it is, the first of January. The book is not done, not delivered. No words can change that. I tried, I promise you. I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I've now blown the end of the year deadline. And that almost certainly means that no, THE WINDS OF WINTER will not be published before the sixth season of GAME OF THRONES premieres in April (mid April, we are now told, not early April, but those two weeks will not save me). Even as late as my birthday and our big Emmy win, I still thought I could do it... but the days and weeks flew by faster than the pile of pages grew, and (as I often do) I grew unhappy with some of the choices I'd made and began to revise... and suddenly it was October, and then November... and as the suspicion grew that I would not make it after all, a gloom set in, and I found myself struggling even more. The fewer the days, the greater the stress, and the slower the pace of my writing became.

Emphasis is mine.

He must have gone back in the story pretty deeply and cut the guts out of it.

[Nathan Stark]

5 hours ago, Ibbison from Ibben said:

Emphasis is mine.

He must have gone back in the story pretty deeply and cut the guts out of it.

Well, maybe. Then again, this is George R. R. Martin we're talking about here. He's just not a fast or prolific writer. He might have cut some material, gardened other stuff, and kept a chunk of story the same. We can't really say for sure. The guy is not a fast writer even when things are going well.

If it's true that he's wrapped up several pov characters for Winds, than we could get the book as soon as.... 2025.

[BlackLightning]

4 hours ago, Nathan Stark said:

Well, maybe. Then again, this is George R. R. Martin we're talking about here. He's just not a fast or prolific writer. He might have cut some material, gardened other stuff, and kept a chunk of story the same. We can't really say for sure. The guy is not a fast writer even when things are going well.

If it's true that he's wrapped up several pov characters for Winds, than we could get the book as soon as.... 2025.

If he keeps saying 75% done, then it's for a reason. He knows that in the past that he has mucked up a lot of different deadlines that he set for himself, for the editors and the fans.

However, he strikes me as someone who learns his lessons ESPECIALLY since he has avoided giving hard-and-fast estimations with numerical value or percentages or dates for years.

In other words, if he really is close to 75% done, there's no reason why we wouldn't get the book by this time next year or even by Q1 of 2024.

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

13 hours ago, BlackLightning said:

However, he strikes me as someone who learns his lessons...

I very much disagree with that.

[Werthead]

13 hours ago, BlackLightning said:

If he keeps saying 75% done, then it's for a reason. He knows that in the past that he has mucked up a lot of different deadlines that he set for himself, for the editors and the fans.

However, he strikes me as someone who learns his lessons ESPECIALLY since he has avoided giving hard-and-fast estimations with numerical value or percentages or dates for years.

In other words, if he really is close to 75% done, there's no reason why we wouldn't get the book by this time next year or even by Q1 of 2024.

I think the estimate would be more set in stone if he gave a manuscript page number update. He's been reluctant to do that, but that I think would be a more solid view of progress. Although if he doesn't know the final hard MS page limit, because it's not more flexible than the set-in-stone 1500 page limit of earlier books, that might not help either.