All day on New Year’s Day, George R.R. Martin posted updates to his Not A Blog that amounted to Cliffs Notes versions of a much longer entry he intended to post on New Year’s Eve, because LiveJournal (as it is sometimes wont to do) ate his post and was unable to recover it. Many of these posts are positive, detailing the very full year Mr. Martin had, which included Emmy Awards and getting a couple more non-ASOIAF projects off the ground. The way he did this actually allowed him to dramatically ramp up into the Big One: a status update on The Winds of Winter. Well, that post is here… and it’s not a happy one.
"THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished.Believe me, it gave me 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.Nor is it likely to be finished tomorrow, or next week. Yes, there’s a lot written. Hundreds of pages. Dozens of chapters…But there’s also a lot still left to write. I am months away still… and that’s if the writing goes well. (Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.) Chapters still to write, of course… but also rewriting. I always do a lot of rewriting, sometimes just polishing, sometimes pretty major restructures."
Unlike many previous “book status update” posts, this one is unexpectedly thorough and candid, as Martin detailed his plans to potentially have the book ready for us before the sixth season of Game of Thrones, and how those plans fell through, and how those plans falling through affected him. He mentions his Douglas Adams-like relationship with deadlines (“Look, I have always had problems with deadlines. For whatever reason, I don’t respond well to them.”) before openly proclaiming that he won’t make excuses or lay blame for the delay. (Also, he revised a Theon chapter very recently! Theon, you guys!)
That’s two-thirds of the post. (This is the longest post in his 2015 wrap-up saga.) The last section touches on the subject of spoilers.
"Will the show ‘spoil’ the novels?Maybe. Yes and no. Look, I never thought the series could possibly catch up with the books, but it has. The show moved faster than I anticipated and I moved more slowly. There were other factors too, but that was the main one. Given where we are, inevitably, there will be certain plot twists and reveals in season six of GAME OF THRONES that have not yet happened in the books."
There’s a whole heap of differences in terms of who’s alive and who’s dead, certainly, which will still make the books different from the show in several ways. But it seems inevitable that season six will include elements of the unpublished sixth novel.
And that’s where we are, folks. Martin’s gone back to his “it’s done when it’s done” stance, and we’re rocketing towards another year where the show will be ahead of the books (sort of). Personally, I’m just hopeful that this year will be better for both Martin and TWoW than last year was.