George RR Martin missed his deadlines, ‘Winds of Winter’ will be published late

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You guys know that I don’t read the Game of Thrones books, right? I don’t. I never have. I never will. I only got into it because of the TV show, although I have spent a significant amount of time reading fan-theories and background information, mostly written by people who have read the books. To me, the books and the TV show are two different animals. I accept that the book readers will be pissed off with how the show handles certain things, and I accept that the book readers probably have a richer and deeper relationship with the characters. At this point, though, I’m just NOT reading the books because GOD KNOWS when the book series will ever be finished. There was a lot of hope that George R.R. Martin would complete and publish The Winds of Winter (the penultimate book in the series) before the new season of GoT begins airing in April. Not so much.

It’s now official: George R.R. Martin will not have his next novel out before HBO’s Game of Thrones returns in April. The author posted on his blog early Saturday that the eagerly awaited book The Winds of Winter is “not finished.”

“My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed… but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me,” he wrote.

Martin’s fans have been very concerned about this because the storylines in the TV series have now surpassed the narrative in Martin’s books. With the upcoming season, Thrones will plow headlong into previously unrevealed territory. Martin also gave readers some rare backstory into his publication process. He planned to have the sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire saga done by April, but missed his first deadline at the end of October. His last novel in the saga, the 1,040-page A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011.

“Unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked,” he wrote. “You can blame my travels or my blog posts or the distractions of other projects and the Cocteau and whatever, but maybe all that had an impact… you can blame my age, and maybe that had an impact too…but if truth be told, sometimes the writing goes well and sometimes it doesn’t, and that was true for me even when I was in my 20s. And as spring turned to summer, I was having more bad days than good ones. Around about August, I had to face facts: I was not going to be done by Halloween.”

Martin’s editors then extended his deadline, but he missed that one too.

“I still thought I could do it… but the days and weeks flew by faster than the pile of pages grew, and (as I often do) I grew unhappy with some of the choices I’d made and began to revise … There are no excuses. No one else is to blame … I tried, and I am still trying.” So when will the new book come out? “I am not going to set another deadline for myself to trip over,” Martin wrote. “The deadlines just stress me out. I am going back to my stance from last March, before all this. It will be done when it’s done. And it will be as good as I can possibly make it.”

Martin noted it’s rare for an author to have to keep pace with the production of a filmed adaptation of his material. He also tackled the “will the show spoil the books” question and pointed out that the Emmy-winning series is increasingly diverging from his work.

“When you ask me, ‘will the show spoil the books,’ all I can do is say, ‘yes and no,’ and mumble once again about the butterfly effect,” Martin wrote. “Those pretty little butterflies have grown into mighty dragons. Some of the ‘spoilers’ you may encounter in season six may not be spoilers at all… because the show and the books have diverged, and will continue to do so.”

[From EW]

SHAME! *rings bell*

You can read GRRM’s blog entry here. At this point, I do think it’s fair for the fans to wonder aloud if GRRM is ever going to finish. I think he’ll complete The Winds of Winter and it will be published either late 2016 or maybe even 2017. But considering how long it’s taken him to do this one, do you think he’ll live to finish A Dream of Spring, the final book? Some have said that’s not a fair question to ask of GRRM. But seriously. Do you think he’ll ever finish? I for one am glad that the show will answer some of the most pressing questions in the coming season.

Here’s a recently-released teaser image of Bran Stark for the coming season. I’m also including the teaser trailer released a few weeks ago. We just have to wait until April, peeps!

bran stark

Photos courtesy of WENN, EW.

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71 Responses to “George RR Martin missed his deadlines, ‘Winds of Winter’ will be published late”

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  1. Lindy79 says:

    Has he said how many books he feels will close out the series? I don’t think this one was even meant to close it out so my faith in him living long enough to finish isn’t high. Book readers need to make their peace with the tv show being the only medium for the foreseeable which is a shame having been invested for so long.
    Sorry for being morose.

    • Olenna says:

      Agree. I love the show, so I’ve already made peace and moved on. How he fulfills his life is not up to me, a bookreader. My “investment” in buying and reading the series was a choice I made, so he doesn’t owe me anything.

    • TheSageM says:

      It’s supposed to be seven. So this one and one more.

    • lilacflowers says:

      Seven books. It has always been seven books.

    • The Real Alicia says:

      He has changed the number around a few times but he has been firm on seven for a while. He has also said if he dies he doesn’t want anyone else to write the books. I know a lot of GOT fans and they are freaking out over the wait.

  2. Jenns says:

    I do not think he will ever finish and I think he is over it at this point. Maybe we will get WOW, but I don’t believe we’ll ever get a final book. I do think he is still into the story and and has a vision for how it will all play out, but when it comes to actually sitting down and writing the details of it all, it’s too much for him.

  3. vauvert says:

    Having waited for twenty years (or is it more?) since the first book, I am neither surprised nor angry about the delay. Writing a book is a complex process, as Neil Gaiman eloquently blogged last week. Martin will finish, hopefully, but if he doesn’t, the show will provide closure for the fans, be they readers or watchers or both. HODOR! Luckily, HBO has the info they need to complete the series, and I think that despite the divergence, additional / missing characters and so on, the denouement will be sufficiently on point to satisfy.
    I hope Martin completes it to his satisfaction (and ours). There are several writers (Lynch, Rothfuss, heck even Gaiman who has been promising a Neverwhere sequel) who are slow. That’s ok. That’s how their genius works.

    • bokchoi says:

      close to twenty, you are about right. I remember reading “A Game of Thrones” when it first came out in paperback, and my now adult son was just a newborn at the time…

    • lou says:

      Neil wrote that blog post about Martin in 2009! It still holds true, though.

  4. mia girl says:

    Never read the books either so I’m not affected, but I feel for those fans who are GOT book readers. It’s got to be frustrating.

    On a much happier note, over the holidays I had the great fortune of meeting and briefly chatted with Pedro Pascal!
    He was vacationing with his family in Orlando at the Universal parks.
    I almost hyperventilated afterward! Such.a.nice.guy. And so handsome.

  5. lilacflowers says:

    Croquembouche!
    Croquemhodor!
    Croquemdrogon!
    Croquemwunwun!
    Croquemshame!
    I f***ing hate Thenns!

    The television series has not caught up with book Arya, Bran (almost), Jamie, Sam, or Brienne. If only they could just focus on them and update us on the doings of Nymeria, Arya’s direwolf, who is quite active in the books on her own.

  6. Angelica says:

    I haven’t read the books, but as much as he’s put into the series, I think he should take his time. It’s always frustrating when doing the thing you love becomes pressurized where he felt like he had to scramble to finish it. He’d probably prefer to put his heart into it if he revised it last minute. Do you, man.

    • Bridget says:

      Let’s just say we’re in no danger of Martin doing a rush job. He past that point about a decade ago.

  7. Word says:

    The last book was crap.

    • original kay says:

      I don’t know, I liked how he got Tyrion and Danys together (you know, when she gets back) and I can kind of see where it’s all going.
      It was just 500 pages too long- all the Tyrion voyage stuff WAS crap and I hated Penny. Just a useless subplot entirely.

      But the ending! woo! who knew the Spider had it in him? Also, the real Sansa story line is intriguing. Littlefinger is a mastermind, truly the best character of them all, imo.

  8. jinni says:

    This is why I try not to get into books if they are a series if the series isn’t already done by the time I start on book one, because of bs like this.

  9. original kay says:

    I think he is his own worst enemy when it comes to his writing. He gets lost is subplot hell.

    I have faith he will wrap it all up and we will be astonished at the subtlety of his writing. I hope.

    • Maria A. says:

      According to my friend, who’s been reading the books, he really needed an editor on the last book. She said he had a bad case of the doldrums, going nowhere in a no particular hurry at all. Somewhere, Hemingway is laughing.

    • Bridget says:

      He’s needed a better editor for close to 15 years. Books 4 & 5 were originally supposed to be 1 book. Lots and lots of words, very little plot over BOTH books.

  10. eribra says:

    I don’t read this series but I’ve read many. The wait is terrible but it’s worse when what you waited for is crap. That’s only really happened to me once, in a series I started as a kid, but once was enough. I hope he takes his time and does it right.

  11. CK says:

    Am I the only one who’s a bit tired of the whole “He’s not going to live long enough to finish” shtick? I get that it’s funny, but in a year where the leading presidential contenders are 68 (Hillary), 69(Donald Trump), and 74(Bernie), I think we can lay off the belief that everyone over 60 is knocking at death’s door. Heck, no wonder he’s living his life to the fullest. I would be too if every article about me had me dying in the next 5 years or so.

    • Bridget says:

      One of Martin’s contemporaries, Robert Jordan, contracted a rare blood disorder and passed away before his very long (and very loved) series was finished – he ended up bringing in another author to finish the series, and even that took 3 very large books. And GRRM isn’t exactly a paragon of healthy living himself.

      • CK says:

        I’m sure GRRM and his doctors are more knowledgeable about his health and life expectancy than most of the people already planning his funeral since GoT started airing. He doesn’t need to be eating berries and carrots to make it to 75/80. Now if ASOIAF were a 12 book series that needed atleast 20 more years to be completed, then yeah, he wouldn’t make it.

      • Bridget says:

        You asked, I answered. People are bringing up Clinton and Sanders’ age as well.

    • Deering says:

      Funny–I thought Trump was ageless. It certainly seems that way. 😛

  12. Eden75 says:

    I am probably the rare person on the planet who has not watched the series. I love the books (although, I agree with Word’s comment that the last was crap) and have no urge to see the show. As a huge book reader, I am leery of anything that is put to film from books that I like (see Stephen King) as it usually is a huge disappointment. While I have heard people rave about the series, I have also heard some serious complaining about it, so I’m going to wait. Eventually, maybe, I might get to watch it once the books are completed. If he never does get them done, then I will find out where in the series the books left off and go from there.

  13. Valois says:

    I hate how some “fans” are mad at him. Yes, it takes ages for him to finish a novel. Yes, I’m waiting fot the next one, too. But no one forced me to read the books. He doesn’t owe me anything and I can’t understand why people think he does. Yes, his fans made him rich, so what? No one forced them to do that and it’s unbelievable how many act like entitled brats, calling him a “fat, lazy ass”.

    • CK says:

      I truly hate entitlement when it comes to entertainment products and entities. People love acting like they were being charitable when purchasing a product when someone’s successful when they actually just got what they paid for.

    • The Real Alicia says:

      I know, right? On his blog he talks sports, politics, hobbies, conventions, the Hugos and other stuff and every single time he has fans screaming at him to get back to work on the next book. The guy can’t even take a vacation without many of the GOT fans going nuts. He’s a NY Jets fan and when he went to training camp last summer all I heard was people bitching about why hasn’t he finished the book. It must be exhausting to not even be able to live a little and take a small vacation or talk about non-GOT things without irate fans breathing down your neck. You’re exactly right when you use the term “brats.”

    • Snazzy says:

      Agreed! Plus writing is very difficult, and especially fantasy fiction, as the story is not only about the characters and plot, but also about world building, which is extremely complex.

      • I Choose Me says:

        Few Readers understand the writing process. Not all authors have the prolific gene and as you said the fantasy (and sci-fi) genre are often the most challenging.

        There are days when you loath your characters, despise a plot line you previously loved and feel tempted to chuck it all. Novels also go through seemingly endless drafts before they are completed. I won’t say finished. Ask any writer. Books are never ‘finished.’ Even in published works you’ll often see something you wish you could add, or revise.

      • Farhi says:

        That is why I stick with poetry. I couldn’t be a writer if my life depended on it. The endless re-writes and editing are not for everyone. I find it surprising that literature is such a popular degree.

      • Bridget says:

        I don’t feel entitled to anything – he can choose whether or not to write and I can choose whether or not to read his books, but that’s it as far as my role and responsibility. But I personally find GRRM very frustrating, because part of the issue is that he is in DIRE need of a good editor (as anyone who read the last 2 books can attest to) and I have a feeling that it would greatly expedite the process. And of course there’s the fact that the man genuinely doesn’t seem to enjoy writing these books (which I get, its hard to sustain that same i spiration for a couple of decades) but won’t hand off the story to a ghostwriter. He’s been stuck for a long, long time and it’s reasonable to assume that he’s not going to get himself un-stuck. Work with a ghostwriter or a better editor, then he can go to the Cons he loves, guest edit on everything and anything, and write all the episodes of the show he can, and then someone can just finish the damn story.

  14. Incredulous says:

    He is never finishing. I’ll point out he hasn’t finished a book since the year 2000 when the third book came out. The fourth and fifth book are supposed to be one book and the climax of the fifth book has been moved to the sixth book. The show will – barring acts of HBO – finish before the sixth book is out and it serves him right. He should just admit he has no interest and move on.

    • Sarah says:

      That’s a ridiculous thing to say.
      Have YOU published a multi-faceted fantasy series then?
      You have no idea what goes in to writing a book, let alone one that has to intertwine with 5 other published books and tie in to the following book too.
      You don’t just sit down with your laptop and a cup of tea and start writing away.

      Nothing “serves him right” – a company was interested in making the book into a series and did so. Get over it you big sooky baby

  15. thaisajs says:

    Maybe if he didn’t go off onto so many tangents and produce 25,000-page books (or whatever), he would have been done by now. His books have always been bloated but it’s only gotten worse with each new GoT book. He’s in desperate need of a strict editor.

  16. Georgie Dragon says:

    He’ll never finish because he made the series too big. There are too many minor characters made into main ones, too much time spent on sub plots, like half a book on Brienne looking for Sansa when it could have been one chapter to get the idea. He introduces really minor characters, invests in them, kills them off, wasting several chapters. If he had just stuck to the main ones mostly he might have finished. He is a great author and I love his books but it’s like building a house and getting distracted by paint colours while your roof isn’t on yet.

    • Original T.C. says:

      +1
      Too many subplots and sideshows that’s why he can’t finish.

      Unfortunately, the HBO episodes that are based on the books are the best. When they try to improv it’s usually messy. But I think I am ready to admit he will never finish the book series and we will just have to settle for the poorer HBO version. Too bad.

    • Fallon says:

      “…it’s like building a house and getting distracted by paint colours while your roof isn’t on yet.”

      x1000000000000000000

  17. Bridget says:

    Big shock. GRRM has spent the last decade doing everything but write GOT. At this point he’s too old and too successful to be kept to any sort of deadline, so what we get is what we get. The man needs a strong editor (as evidenced by his last 2 books and their meandering plotlines) but is too headstrong to listen. Not to mention that even he is uninspired by the direction his story took. This is disappointing, but not shocking.

  18. Farhi says:

    I’ll be happy if he never writes another book of GoT.
    Actually I wish he didn’t write any of it. In his books people are animals, worse than animals actually as they kill and maim and torture needlessly.

    And I don’t believe the line that this is how people were in Middle Ages. There are some tribes and regions living the way people lived in Middle Ages. They are not needlessly violent.
    There were some monsters in the Middle Ages and torture was vicious but it wasn’t how everyone lived, nor was it a norm.

    • queenofcauliflowers says:

      what the what? farhi, did you even read one of his book? you do realize that it’s not set in the middle ages, right? it’s a work of fantasy which doesn’t claim to mirror the way people lived and/or were tortured in the middle ages.

      • Farhi says:

        I read may be 1/3 of the first book and threw it away in disgust. I didn’t need all that graphic violence in my head. I remember very well the point where I had enough – the rape of the girl that the dwarf prince married.

        The reason I bring up Middle Ages is that it is the usual defense used by GoT fans for its gratuitous violence. They claim that this is how people were in Middle Ages, and it was normal back then and this is what the books are based on. No, they weren’t.

      • Sarah says:

        Umm… nope… it’s a fantasy realm. It is not, nor has it ever been set in the Middle Ages. That’s a comparison people use as it’s about kingdoms and nobility and peasants and such but it is 100% fantasy. There are dragons. DRAGONS!

        If you can’t handle the violence, don’t read or watch. It’s a free world and I will read and watch as much as I please.

      • Farhi says:

        I don’t read of watch.
        I find it disturbing that so many people, women especially, find graphic rape and torture re-enactments entertaining.
        I have no objection to the dragons.

      • Maria A. says:

        He has used historical examples as an excuse for what he’s written. Read that in an interview somewhere.

  19. Amelie says:

    This is disappointing but not unexpected. He is constantly traveling to cons and doing interviews and blogging about dumb things like football on his LiveJournal (sorry football fans but I don’t care about who GRRM follows in football). It is frustrating when you can clearly tell from social media (I follow him on Twitter) that he is doing anything but writing. I understand about good and bad writing days, I consider myself a writer. But when the story becomes bigger than the writer can handle, there is only one person to blame and that is the writer. JK Rowling finished Harry Potter, Stephen King eventually finished The Dark Tower (and many readers were worried he wouldn’t after he got run over by a van which meant a long recovery period), JRR Tolkien finished LOTR. Sorry George, you get no sympathy from me.

    • Deering says:

      Gah. Look, one of the fastest ways for a writer to go stale or burn out is to do nothing _but_ writing. Everything one does is either grist for the creative mill–or a neccessary break from it. Even procrastination can be a way the mind gets a creative second wind or push. For fans to expect every author to be as compulsive/driven as King or as churn-em-out as Patterson is utterly unfair. As well, a story takes on a life of its own. All the cool bits, sweeping characterizations, and vivid detail wouldn’t happen if a writer wasn’t…wait for it…creating. It takes time to invent; to research and think through. It takes time to try things usually fail–and every successful author has horror stories of plotting that didn’t pan out after deadlines blown and months of work. It took Rowling how many years to do Potter? IIRC, Tolkein needed 20 for LOTR. And neither had an adaptation breathing down their neck to this extent. No writer sets out to let a story get too big–they go where creativity takes them. It’s very rare you can have real invention without taking time, and no reader would like the alternative. Sheesh.

  20. mayamae says:

    I asked this last thread and got no response – anyone reading the spoilers for season 6?

  21. kimbers says:

    I’ll download this upcoming season after I read the book. The longer I wait the less interested I seem to get. I’m getting older like the aging author and my interests seem to shift from GoT to other things. I prefered the book version more than the tv version bc it told a better detailed story of who was on which side and the backstabbing. The tv version is good but I can wait to watch it bc of the short seasons and like I said my interest is dwindling in the show

  22. Dee Kay says:

    I’m a fan of the show (not die-hard — it definitely has problems, not least of which is how much it features nudity and rape) and I’ll never read the books, so I don’t really care if GRRM ever finishes them. But at this point, I think it’s clear that the war between book fans and show fans has to end. Not that it will, LOL, do fan wars ever end? But whereas most book vs. film/TV fans argue over the fact that the media adaptation wasn’t “true” to the book(s), now I think it is clear that HBO and the showrunners will absolutely finish the story before GRRM does. The show will be the “canonical” text, and indeed the only text for many years, that covers this later part of the story. So book fans will have nothing, literally nothing, to complain about as far as the “adaptation” goes because it won’t be an adaptation. The show will be the primary, original, and only material about GoT until GRRM publishes the last two books.

    • Sarah says:

      It’s always odd to me how people dislike how much rape the show has in it.. they find it distasteful, awful, horrible etc.
      It has less rape than real life does though!
      Depending on where you live, 1 in 3 women experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. Once you’ve been raped, the odds are even higher that you’ll be raped again. We’ve seen a few rape scenes in GoT but nowhere near 1 in 3 of the women on the show has been raped or assaulted.

      It’s real life you need to fix before finger wagging at television shows.

  23. Alison E says:

    I won’t read them unless he finishes them. I’VE BEEN BURNED BEFORE, LOOKING AT YOU ROBERT JORDAN AND FRANK HERBERT. >.<

  24. msd says:

    An acquaintance of mine said she didn’t like GOT because it was “too rapey”, then talked about how much she liked Outlander. Some people are stupid.

  25. Goodnight says:

    I feel like one of the only book fans who wasn’t disappointed by this announcement because I never, not for one moment, expected WoW to be out before season 6. I’ve always thought we’d be extremely lucky to get it before the end of 2016 and we’re more likely to get it in 2017.

    Honestly, sometimes I think it’s better to just be a show watcher because then you don’t have to put up with characters you care deeply for being assassinated by the show (literally and character-wise). I am never going to get over the stupidity of taking Loras, whose sexuality was incidental in the books, and turning his entire character arc into ‘Loras is gay’.

    So yeah, I think show only people are better off.

  26. FF says:

    I know he’s a fan of Mervyn Peake but ever since I found that out I’ve convinced the last books will never be finished by him, and some other author will be handed his incompletes and notes, and will finish it very divisively so that fans spend the next twenty years plus arguing about it, and re-interpreting it and rewriting it, and remembering what he told them at cons, or said to the actors…

    And the show itself won’t help because people will be split worse on that.

    So another twenty years of fanwank that he had plenty of time to avoid that spawns ‘marketing opportunity’ spin offs and serials…ugh, the stuff of nightmares.

    For the love of God man, just finish them already. Can’t he see where this is going?

  27. AnotherDirtyMartini says:

    Well, it’s not up to us fans. You can’t pressure an artist into creating their work. Again, their work! Love the books, love the show. No sense in adding to GRR Martin’s stress level. I think he’ll do it, but it can’t be forced.

  28. Wheez says:

    I think if you’d rather watch Football instead of write about Arya,Jaime,Tyrion,Cersei,etc…that means you have no interest in your characters. Should be interesting to see where the show heads, but honestly, maybe Martin has too much money and wants to just kick back and pig out while gaming. Nothing wrong with that but alot of comments on here about him needing an editor are spot on. Authors lose sight sometimes and need someone to give them a kick in the pants. Meanwhile,I’m looking forward to the return of Yara and the IronBorn this season! George won’t finish the books because the truth is, there IS NO ENDING.