George R.R. Martin Has Stopped Working On The Last Game Of Thrones Book
It’s the question on the tip of the tongues of every Game of Thrones fan—has George R.R. Martin stalled in his progress on the next literary installment in the series, Winds of Winter, for a whole year?
The author recently confessed he completed a total of 1,100 pages for the forthcoming title. Game of Thrones stans, never missing a thing, noted this amount is identical to the one he shared this time last year, December 2022. In other words, George R.R. Martin has stopped working on the long awaited final Game of Thrones book.
As if it were a consolation prize, the writer also dished that fans can expect eight spin-off shows to follow on the heels of House of the Dragon.
It’s not exactly the best news a fan of the series (at least in its literary form) could expect to hear. That said, eight further television projects based on the original HBO show are nothing to sniff at, either. However, as Winds of Winter is nine whole years late, perhaps the projected TV projects will take… more time than expected, too.
George R. R. Martin himself wondered aloud if he should have tackled the over-a-thousand-page novel in smaller chunks. After all, a few new GoT titles, each numbering a couple hundred pages, would certainly all become best sellers. Still, Martin maintained his work in progress–no matter how long it spans or how long it takes to write–is “[…] the main thing that dominates most of my working life.”
The author is a notorious perfectionist, allowing as much time and effort as required to every stage of the creative process, from writing to rewriting to editing and re-editing. Martin conveyed last year that he had fully completed many of the enormous novel’s character arcs, while others remain unfinished.
The first approximate release date for Winds of Winter was, unbelievably, 2014. This farcical prediction came from Martin himself around the release of his last novel, A Dance With Dragons. With every successive delay of the publication date, the book has become an inside joke among fans of the novels, who are legion.
Devotees of the HBO show based on the string of novels number in even larger numbers, spanning the globe and accounting for the Home Box Office’s biggest hit in history. It’s unsurprising, then, that Martin—the network’s breadwinner—currently works on, as he numbered them, eight new GoT TV projects. A second season of House of the Dragon is presently being developed (as Martin doggedly labors over Winds of Winter), while a new project, Tales of Dunk and Egg, is slated to begin production.
A proper and intriguing prequel, House of the Dragon details the origins and nuances of House Targaryen, the House represented by Queen Daenerys in HBO’s first adaptation of Martin’s work. Dunk and Egg, meanwhile, charts the journey of a knight (Ser Duncan the Tall) and his trusty squire (Aegon V Targaryen)—yes, of the same House as Daenerys.
The remaining spin-off projects are somewhat veiled in obscurity. One of them, 10,000 Ships, is also a prequel, while another, Snow, recasts Kit Harrington as Jon Snow and follows his progress where the original Game of Thrones show left off. Lastly, Lord Corlys, head of House Velaryon, stars in the prospective series, The Sea Snake
HBO also spent a whopping $30 million on a series, The Long Night and The Age of Heroes, before shelving it. Hopefully, Martin doesn’t do the same to Winds of Winter and finally, thankfully, completes it.
