NEED TO KNOW
- George R.R. Martin is sharing an update about the long-awaited next installment in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter
- The author jokingly wrote on his website on Wednesday, May 28 that he doesn’t “give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money”
- “I care about them all,” he later wrote of his characters. “More than you can ever imagine”
George R.R. Martin knows some fans “may be pissed off” by any announcement that isn’t about The Winds of Winter, but he’s got one anyway.
The A Song of Ice and Fire author, 76, revealed in a post on his official website on Wednesday, May 28 that he’s now working on an animated feature adaptation of Howard Waldrop’s novella A Dozen Tough Jobs. And in the same post, he also addressed those who were hoping for some different news.
“I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or The Winds of Winter. You have given up on me, or on the book,” Martin wrote on his Not a Blog website about the long-awaited novel. “I will never finish Winds, If I do, I will never finish A Dream of Spring. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me…”
The revelation comes months after the beloved author told The Hollywood Reporter in December that completing the sixth installment in the A Song of Ice and Fire series was “still a priority,” adding that maybe fans are right that he’ll “never finish.”
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As Martin explained in his latest blog post, he’s “going to die soon anyway, because I’m so old.”
“I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a s— about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money. I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards,” Martin wrote. “You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, A Song for Lya and Dying of the Light, Sandkings and Beauty and the Beast, This Tower of Ashes and The Stone City, Old Mars and Old Venus and Rogues and Warriors and Dangerous Women and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois.”
“You don’t care about any of those, I know,” he added. “You don’t care about anything but Winds of Winter. You’ve told me so often enough.”
Still, Martin continued his blog update with a somewhat promising message to fans.
“Thing is, I do care about them. And I care about Westeros and Winds as well,” he wrote. “The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine.”
Before his latest cheeky response to those pleading for an update on the novel, Martin revealed in 2023 that he was “12 years late on this damn novel and I’m struggling with it,” per IGN.
At the time, Martin explained that he had “hundreds more pages to go” with 1,100 written. He made the same estimation on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert months before, adding that he had around 400 or 500 pages to go.
“It’s a big mother of a book for whatever reason. Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this but it’s tough,” Martin said in 2023. “That’s the main thing that dominates most of my working life.”
