George R.R. Martin Isn't Making Good Progress on Winds of Winter
It doesn't sound like George R.R. Martin will release The Winds of Winter, the sixth installment of A Song of Ice and Fire, in 2022.
On his Not a Blog -- a great name for a blog --- Martin promised readers that he's still working on Winds but hit another road bump last year.
"I made a lot of progress on WINDS in 2020, and less in 2021… but ‘less’ is not ‘none,'" Martin promises.
Fair, but less is not close to enough.
It's been 10 years since Martin released A Dance with Dragons,Winds' predecessor. So any confidence that Martin, 73, will ever finish the book is waning. And now, there's hardly any hope he will complete A Dream of Spring, the series' planned final novel.
Book readers had hoped that the clunky, mostly panned ending of HBO's Game of Thrones would give Martin extra motivation to save his creation. After all, some of us still aren't over how the series ended and won't be for quite some time. However, motivation doesn't appear to be his issue. Martin seems to be in his own head, unable to meet his own expectations for the most highly anticipated book in a generation.
We know this because Martin released Fire & Blood, a Targaryen history book, in 2018. Now, Martin says he is now working on its sequel, possibly called Blood & Fire.
"Got a couple of hundred pages of that one written, but there’s still a long way to go," Martin said of the Fire & Blood's sequel.
Writing about Westeros history doesn't come with the expectations that concluding A Song of Ice and Fire does. Part of the novel series' brilliance is its still-extending world-building, pages of characters and fantasy prophecies. Yet because of this, some readers fear Martin wrote such a complicated story that not even he, the creator, can wrap it all up. HBO certainly could not.
The most likely outcome is that GoT was the only ending we will ever know for Jon, Daenerys, Arya and the Lannisters. So in place of ever reading Martin's ending of the journey, we will have to settle for the upcoming House of the Dragon TV show and whatever non-Winds of Winter book Martin puts out next.