George R. R. Martin is so very sick of people complaining about Winds Of Winter

While ostensibly promoting a new project based on the work of his late friend Howard Waldrop, Martin unleashed some ire on impatient fans.

By William Hughes | May 28, 2025 | 9:37pm

Photo: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO

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George R. R. Martin is so very sick of people complaining about Winds Of Winter

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It’s been a minute since we checked in on George R.R. Martin’s “Not-A-Blog,” the number one spot on the internet for the author to post the prolific output of his modern-day career: Blog posts yelling at people for yelling at him for not finishing the next A Song Of Ice And Fire book, The Winds Of Winter. Also, talking about those direwolves that got brought back from extinction recently, and promoting projects like the films he’s been making from the work of his late friend Howard Waldrop. (Next up: A fully animated feature film, titled A Dozen Tough Jobs, written by Joe Lansdale, and based on Waldrop’s 1989 adaptation of the Twelve Labors Of Hercules.)

But the venue is also very much where Martin feels comfortable venting about the frustrations in his life, whether that’s being mad that HBO excised a character from House Of The Dragon, or wider anger about screenwriters and directors screwing with his stuff in general. But no topic has gotten more acid from Martin over the years than people complaining to him about the fact that it’s now been 14 years since he published A Dance With Dragons, the fifth book of his seven-book cycle, with no sign of the sixth actually arriving any time soon. We’ve written about Martin’s unhappy takes on this feedback before, but honestly, it’s worth reading the whole latest digression that he launched into in his post this week and just luxuriating in his use of language. (Since you’re, uh, not going to get that particular treat any other way any time soon, as far as we can tell.)

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Here’s Martin, interrupting himself midway through talking about A Dozen Tough Jobs:

(I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or The Winds Of Winter. You have given up on me, or on the book. I will never finish Winds. If I do, I will never finish A Dream Of Spring. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me… I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money. I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards. You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, “A Song for Lya” and Dying Of The Light, “Sandkings” and Beauty And The Beast, “This Tower of Ashes” and “The Stone City,” Old Mars and Old Venus and Rogues and Warriors and Dangerous Women and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois. You don’t care about any of those, I know. You don’t care about anything but Winds Of Winter. You’ve told me so often enough.)

Thing is, I do care about them.

And I care about Westeros and Winds as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine.

Martin—who, we note in passing, and with no pejorative meaning intended, is currently 76—then got back to the job of promoting the new movie, before ending on a slightly wistful note: “Hercules, Howard, Joe, Lion Forge… I wish you all could share my excitement at the prospect of this movie.”