George R.R. Martin hopes The Winds Of Winter (and the coronavirus) will be done by next year

By Sam Barsanti  |  June 24, 2020 | 2:21am
Aux Features Books
George R.R. Martin hopes The Winds Of Winter (and the coronavirus) will be done by next year
George R.R. Martin and his small golden friend Photo: Rich Polk

It’s been a month since we checked in on George R.R. Martin, who dared to suggest back in March that he had been spending his coronavirus lockdown working on The Winds Of Winter—a.k.a. the next Song Of Ice And Fire book, the basis for HBO’s Game Of Thrones, which he’s been “working on” for nearly a decade. He said he was writing every day, “spending more time in Westeros than in the real world,” and not going anywhere or seeing anyone. The implication was clear: Martin is going to release The Winds Of Winter any second now, maybe even by tomorrow.

Today, Martin has posted a new entry on his Not A Blog in which he says that the book “will not be finished tomorrow” and that we should not “give any credence to any of the click-bait websites that like to parse every word of my posts as if they were papal encyclicals to divine hidden meanings.” Ha ha, those websites sound like assholes. Stay away from those websites! Anyway, Martin says in his new blog that he has continued to write for “long hours every day” and has completed several chapters in just the last few weeks, but “it’s going to be a huge book” and he still has “a long way to go.”

Specifically, he says he’s recently “been visiting with Cersei, Asha, Tyrion, Ser Barristan, and Areo Hotah” and will be “dropping back into Braavos next week.” He also ends his post by mentioning that Arya is about to kill someone. Interesting teases! As for when The Winds Of Winter will be done, Martin says that he hopes both it and COVID-19 will be finished by next year so he can attend CoNZealand, which he was supposed to go to this year but couldn’t.

Elsewhere in the post, Martin talks about what he’s been reading (If It Bleeds, The Glass Hotel) and how he’s been having bad days (“which get me down”) and good days (“which lift me up”), but overall he’s “pleased.” Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to parse every word of this post as if it were a papal encyclical.

 
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