One of the nice things about George R.R. Martin—the fitfully prolific, occasionally cantankerous architect of some of the most popular tales in modern Western storytelling—is that he’s generally a lot more open with fans than a man in his position might be inclined to be. That most especially comes through in Martin’s “Not A Blog,” where the author has spent years not only promoting those projects he’s most recently working on (and whose collaborators have not entered into some kind of PR-monitored blood feud with him), but also giving a window into his life and thoughts. It is, in other words, an author blog of the old school, largely unchanged by modern trends in digital PR, and, as a consequence, it often feels personal in a way other such missives wouldn’t.
Which is why there’s something genuinely sad about seeing Martin so down in his most recent post to the blog, which went up on August 3, and which marks the author’s first time writing for his site since February. (Posts since then were written by a team Martin, in typical style, refers to as “my mighty minions.”) Sure, there’s a bit of crowing about Emmy nominations for HBO’s A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms—whose showrunner, Ira Parker, reportedly has a much warmer relationship with Martin these days than House Of The Dragon‘s Ryan Condal—even as Martin is a bit sad that the show’s actors didn’t get any love from the Academy. But most of the blog seems to be taken up with musings on time and age, as Martin, who’s about to turn 78 next month, writes, “But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come. I turned seventy-seven last September, and I tell you, getting old is no fun.”
Normally, at this point, we’d also include an aside here about The Winds Of Winter, the sixth main series A Song Of Ice And Fire book, which Martin has ostensibly been working on for the past 15 years. But, honestly, he not only doesn’t talk about the book here, but he doesn’t even muster the energy (as he did last year) to angrily talk about people complaining about him not talking about the book—the sort of thing that really makes it feel like the novel is not currently within his grasp. (He hasn’t published a full-length book of original material since 2018’s Fire And Blood, the first volume of a fake history of the Targaryen dynasty cobbled together from material he’d been working on for an ASOIAF companion book, and which serves as the basis for House; the second volume is supposedly set to arrive after the publication of Winds.)
It’s not all doom and gloom, to be sure: Martin notes that “There have been amazing times, as well,” even as he suggests that there may be unnamed impediments to him attending the Emmys in person this year. “I suppose that’s just life,” he writes. “Of course, I knew that. If you’ve read my stories, you know that.”
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