‘Winds of Winter’: A timeline of George RR Martin’s progress

August 10, 2025

21 13 minutes read

‘Winds of Winter’: A timeline of George RR Martin’s progress — 2xDJh2AmzGND9xCQV5p7vX.jpg

The next book in George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” book series, “The Winds of Winter,” is one of the most highly anticipated fantasy novels ever, and fans have been awaiting its release for over a decade now. Martin has periodically fed his fanbase breadcrumbs of updates, but a completed project remains as far off now as it was when HBO’s “Game of Thrones” TV show first premiered over 14 years ago.

Martin may not be finished with the sixth book of the intended seven-book series, but he has taken on some interesting side quests in the meantime, including a number of “Game of Thrones” spinoff shows. Earlier this year, he published a peer-reviewed physics paper that he coauthored for the American Journal of Physics, and most recently, he helped debut the news about a de-extinction project featuring a creature most famously known for being on the sigil of House Stark. But fantasy fans don’t seem to be satisfied with these activities, and many are beginning to wonder whether the next installment in the acclaimed fantasy series will ever see the light of day. Despite this, Martin seemingly remains confident that the next tale of the Starks and the Lannisters will hit shelves — one day.

announced he had moved two completed chapters (told from Arianne’s point of view) from “A Dance with Dragons,” the fifth book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, into the sixth book, “The Winds of Winter.” He described this as “good news for” “The Winds of Winter,” as he now had “four chapters done for that one (an Arya, a Sansa, and two Ariannes).”

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blog update, Martin again said he had moved a chapter, this time focused on Aeron Greyjoy, into “The Winds of Winter” from “A Dance with Dragons.” “The good news is that I seem to have written more than a hundred pages of ‘The Winds of Winter’ already,” he said on his blog.

The Guardian, Martin predicted he would complete “The Winds of Winter” in about three years, a faster pace than the previous book. “Realistically, it’s going to take me three years to finish the next one at a good pace,” he said, adding, “I hope it doesn’t take me six years like this last one has.”

Entertainment Weekly that he would return to working on “The Winds of Winter” in January 2012.

Adria’s News, “I’ve already written 400 pages of my sixth book, and I really look forward to publishing it in 2014.” However, he warned he was “really bad” at predictions, and “of these 400 pages, only 200 are really finished because I still have to revise the other 200 pages, which are in a rough version and I still have to work on them a lot.”

Entertainment Weekly this “has been important to me all along.”

This deadline was significant because season six was the point at which the HBO show began covering the events of “The Winds of Winter” in a major way after passing the published book material. Martin told EW he’s doing “anything I can do to clear my decks and get this done,” including canceling convention appearances.

said it gave him “no pleasure” to report that “The Winds of Winter” was still unfinished. He described how his publishers gave him two separate deadlines the previous year, first in October and then in December, to complete the book in order to ensure it would be out before “Game of Thrones'” sixth season, but “unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked.”

In May 2015, the October deadline “seemed very do-able to me,” Martin said on his blog. By August, Martin said he felt “confident” he could complete the book by the end of the year but missed both deadlines. “I tried, I promise you,” he added. “I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I’ve now blown the end of the year deadline.” Martin told fans he is still “months away” from finishing, “and that’s if the writing goes well,” though he is “not going to set another deadline for myself to trip over.”

promised he was “not writing anything until he delivered “Winds of Winter.” “Teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions, forewords, nothing,” he added. “And I’ve dropped all my editing projects but Wild Cards.” Martin, however, later walked this back.

admitted he was still “not done” with the book and said he hadn’t made as much progress “as I hoped a year ago, when I thought to be done by now.” He added, “I think it will be out this year. (But hey, I thought the same thing last year).”

told fans that he is “still months away” from finishing “The Winds of Winter.” And despite his earlier statement that he wasn’t writing anything else until “Winds” was done, he is working on the book “Fire & Blood,” a history of the Targaryen dynasty. He says he isn’t sure whether “Fire & Blood” or “The Winds of Winter” will be published first, though. “I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018 … and who knows, maybe two,” Martin writes. “A boy can dream.”

an April 2018 blog, Martin confirmed “Winds of Winter” would not be published before the end of the year, so “you’re going to have to keep waiting.”

assured fans that “Winds of Winter” remained his “top priority,” adding that it was “ridiculous to think otherwise.”

House of the Dragon“.

The month of Fire & Blood’s release in November 2018, Martin told Entertainment Weekly he was “mad” at himself for not finishing “Winds of Winter” yet and has “had dark nights of the soul where I’ve pounded my head against the keyboard and said, ‘God, will I ever finish this? The show is going further and further forward and I’m falling further and further behind. What the hell is happening here?'” The Wall Street Journal reported Martin was “in hiding” at an undisclosed remote mountain “he visits when he wants to hunker down to finish a book.”

Later, during a Penguin Random House Q&A he said he paused working on “The Winds of Winter” for some time to finish “Fire & Blood” so it could serve as source material for the “House of the Dragon” series.

jokingly told fans that “if I don’t have ‘The Winds of Winter’ in hand when I arrive in New Zealand” for the World Science Fiction Convention in July 2020, “you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.”

blog that he was “spending long hours every day” on the book and was “making steady progress.” But “it’s going to be a huge book,” he added, “and I still have a long way to go.” The pandemic gave him an out though, since the World Science Fiction Convention was virtual that year, meaning he technically never physically arrived there.

revealed that he wrote “hundreds and hundreds of pages” of “Winds of Winter” in 2020, calling it his best year on the project yet. “Why? I don’t know,” he mused. “Maybe the isolation. Or maybe I just got on a roll. Sometimes I do get on a roll.” However, Martin cautioned he still had “hundreds of more pages to write to bring the novel to a satisfactory conclusion,” adding, “that’s what 2021 is for, I hope.” But, “I have a zillion other things to do as well,” he said.

wrote a similar blog near the start of 2022, stating that he’d “made a lot of progress on Winds in 2020, and less in 2021 … but ‘less’ is not ‘none.'” Martin seemed to be easing fans into the idea that “Winds” was no longer his only priority, in contrast to his prior promise to write nothing else until it was finished.

“Westeros has become bigger than ‘The Winds of Winter,'” he said, describing the “enormous number of projects” he has on his plate, including a second volume of “Fire & Blood” (which he has already written a “couple hundred pages” of) and more “Dunk & Egg” novellas. Plus, Martin pointed out he was “heavily involved” in all of the “Game of Thrones” spinoff shows, which have taken up a “ton” of his time and attention. “I know, I know, for many of you out there, only one of those projects matters,” Martin said. “I am sorry for you. They ALL matter to me.”

a Penguin Random House Q&A in October 2022, revealing he’s “about three-quarters of the way done” with the book.

This same month, on The Late Show, Martin said he had finished writing the storylines of “a couple of” characters. “But it’s still going to take me a while,” he added. To put this in perspective, these comments come over seven years after Martin felt he could realistically complete the book within a few months.

interview on Stephen Colbert’s “Tooning Out the News,” saying he has written roughly 1,100 or 1,200 pages and needed to write “another 400, 500” more. Martin seemed to be referring to manuscript pages, which differ from published book pages. For comparison, Martin said “A Dance with Dragons” and “A Storm of Swords” were about 1,500 manuscript pages, but each was around 1,000 pages when published.

In his Penguin Random House Q&A, Martin suggested part of what’s been taking so long is his frequent rewriting. He found himself “re-reading some chapters that I’d written earlier, and I didn’t like them well enough, so I kind of ripped them apart and rewrote them.”

his blog. “There are … gulp … more of them than I had once thought.”

Bangcast, the author said he still only had 1,100 pages done, the same amount he had as of December 2022. “Maybe I should’ve started writing smaller books when I began this but it’s tough,” he said. “That’s the main thing that dominates most of my working life.”

London and “the internet went nuts,” Martin said on his blog. But having meetings with his editors was just a part of doing business and did not “signify that some momentous announcement is at hand,” he added. When the book is done, “the word will not trickle out, there WILL be a big announcement…where and when I cannot say.”

This update came a few months after Martin mentioned “Winds of Winter” while sharing his thoughts on another upcoming GOT spin-off, an adaptation of his novella “The Hedge Knight.” “The show will make its debut next year…and if it does well, ‘The Sworn Sword’ and ‘The Mystery Knight’ will follow,” he said. “By which time I hope to have finished some more Dunk & Egg stories (yes, after I finish ‘The Winds of Winter’).”

In the first spot of positive news in a while, Martin revealed that he had made progress with both “The Winds of Winter” and the second part of his Targaryen history book “Fire & Blood,” titled “Blood & Fire.” While he was able to add new pages to both projects, he had a more difficult time getting work done. After the recent death of his friend, science fiction author Howard Waldrop, Martin struggled to find “much solace in my work,” Martin said on his Not a Blog site. “Writing came hard … I would have liked to turn out a lot more.” The various television projects he was working on also “ate up most of those months.”

blog update, Martin mused about his recent trip to Amsterdam, which inspired the city of Braavos, one of the wealthiest cities depicted in Westeros. Some readers assumed the town was based on Venice because of the many canals. “Did you know that Amsterdam has more canals than Venice?” Martin said. He added that one day, he would like to “write that story about Braavos we were developing for HBO.” While the project was shelved years ago, that does not mean he “won’t go back to it… after ‘WINDS OF WINTER’ is done, of course.”

Martin also mentioned the book in an update earlier in October for his “Dunk & Egg” series. Over the years, he has created many characters, all of whom he considers his “literary children,” he said, but “Dunk & Egg were special.” He intends to finish the rest of their tales “in my copious spare time after I finish ‘THE WINDS OF WINTER,’ yes, yes, I know.”

The Hollywood Reporter about four short films he financed based on the work of his friend, Howard Waldrop, Martin took a moment to address the long-awaited novel. “Unfortunately, I am 13 years late,” he said. “Every time I say that, I’m [like], ‘How could I be 13 years late?’ I don’t know, it happens a day at a time.” He again noted that the book is “still a priority.” He also admitted that some fans had already given up, saying he’d never be finished. “Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I’m alive right now! I seem pretty vital!” He added that he could never retire from writing as he is “not a golfer.”

posing with recently born dire wolf pups. The biotech start-up, Colossal Biosciences, said that it had utilized “end-to-end de-extinction technology” to extract DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull, resulting in the creation of three “healthy dire wolf puppies.” Martin featured the extinct creatures heavily in his series and was ecstatic about the arrival of the pups. However, he soon faced mockery from fans on social media, who pointed out that we got “real dire wolves” before “The Winds of Winter.”

When he was asked about those comments in an interview with Time, Martin said the book was “the curse of my life.” There is “no doubt” the book is “13 years late,” but he is “still working on it.” He has made some progress, and then “other things divert my attention and suddenly I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows, I have something else to do.”

It’s easy to forget, amid this epic delay, that “The Winds of Winter” won’t even end the series, as Martin intends to follow it up with a seventh book, “A Dream of Spring.” On his blog, Martin said he plans to “finish ‘The Winds of Winter,’ and then do either ‘A Dream of Spring’ or volume two of Fire & Blood, and slip in a new ‘Dunk & Egg’ between each of those in my copious spare time,” which should “keep me ahead of” HBO’s “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” As book fans know by now, though, Martin’s words are like the wind. They may have an effect, but they are unfortunately not quite tangible.

July 2025: Martin hints that the book is nearing completion

In yet another bit of slim, yet good news for fans, Martin insinuated in an interview with Penguin Random House that “The Winds of Winter” had about 1,500 pages completed. Given that this would already make it the longest installment in the series, it seems the book may finally be nearing the finish line — but don’t get your hopes up just yet. “It’s a challenging book,” said Martin, and this is part of the issue. Some of the “point-of-view characters’ chapters are already finished, but I still need to interweave their narratives to create one cohesive plot.”

popular fantasy video game franchise that he helped create the world for. How much involvement Martin will have as a producer is unclear, though he described the film as “kickass” in a blog post, with “first rate director” Alex Garland at the helm. So while “The Winds of Winter” may still be the priority, “Elden Ring” is just one more can of fuel to add to Martin’s fantasy bonfire.

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August 10, 2025

21 13 minutes read