Winter Isn’t Coming . . .

At least The Winds of Winter, that is. That was the news this week from George R.R. Martin when he informed fans that the next book in this A Song if Ice and Fire series won’t be released before Season 6 of Game of Thrones. 

This news confirms that we’ll learn the fate of Jon Snow and Daenerys from the show, long before we’ll read about it in the books. Here are some excerpts from an i09 article on Martin’s announcement:

We discussed some of them last spring, as the fifth season of the HBO series was winding down, and came up with a plan. We all wanted book six of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE to come out before season six of the HBO show aired. Assuming the show would return in early April, that meant THE WINDS OF WINTER had to be published before the end of March, at the latest.

. . .

Unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked. 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. I cannot tell you how deeply that realization depressed me.

. . .

Here it is, the first of January. The book is not done, not delivered. No words can change that. I tried, I promise you. I failed. I blew the Halloween deadline, and I’ve now blown the end of the year deadline. And that almost certainly means that no, THE WINDS OF WINTER will not be published before the sixth season of GAME OF THRONES premieres in April (mid April, we are now told, not early April, but those two weeks will not save me). Even as late as my birthday and our big Emmy win, 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… and suddenly it was October, and then November… and as the suspicion grew that I would not make it after all, a gloom set in, and I found myself struggling even more. The fewer the days, the greater the stress, and the slower the pace of my writing became.

You can read the full article here.

As someone who writes slowly, I can empathize with Martin’s plight (though at least I have the excuse of a full-time job). I still believe the book will be full of surprises whenever it comes out, especially since the show has already deviated from the books in numerous ways. io9 published a good post on this today, and you can read it here.

All this said, I was looking forward to devouring The Winds of Winter before Season 6 aired. But now I’ll wait patiently for what may be an end of 2016 release. At least Winter will come – eventually.