“THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished.”

With those stark words, George R.R. Martin sums up his lowest point of 2015, confessing on his blog that he failed to complete The Winds of Winter before the new season of HBO’s adaptation, Game of Thrones, begins airing again in mid-April.

In what amounts to a baring of the authorial soul in the sad grip of “bad writing days,” Martin says to his fans that it gave him:

“… no pleasure to type those words. You’re disappointed, and you’re not alone. 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. For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, ‘I have completed and delivered THE WINDS OF WINTER’ on or before the last day of 2015 … But the book’s not done…. I am months away still… and that’s if the writing goes well.”

Martin goes on to confesse he has no idea when the book will be done, asserts that deadlines simply “stress him out,” and says the book will “be done when it’s done. And it will be as good as I can possibly make it.”

Addressing the concerns of fans worried that the HBO series will reveal spoilers he says “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.”

He goes on to point out that people read books and watch adaptations of those books in various orders all the time so the question of the series spoiling the novels is really “Maybe. Yes and no.”

It is a your-mileage-may-vary answer and he defensively supports it with a list of dozens of characters who have already had different fates in his books than on the HBO series.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2016 at 9:48 am and is filed under Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.