George R.R. Martin has known how A Song of Ice and Fire ends for decades

George R.R. Martin is winding down his eventful tour of the British Isles. Towards the end of last week, he attended a fan event at Castle Ward in Northern Ireland, which stood in for Winterfell on Game of Thrones. Speaking to ITV, Martin said that until coming to Castle Ward, where fans were out in force and showing their love for his work, he’d never fully appreciated how important Game of Thrones had become to the Northern Irish tourism industry.

We’ll see if HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series can sustain fan interest in Northern Ireland going forward (he didn’t give any new info on those, by the way, although he’s said plenty already), although Martin reminds us that there are plenty of other reasons to visit places like Belfast and Dubrovnik that have nothing to do with his imaginings.

Not that those imaginings aren’t reason enough. And he has a lot more to do. “The show is finished but I’m not finished,” he said. “The show got ahead of me several years ago, which I never thought would happen, but the show made some decisions to omit certain characters and subplots that I was dealing with, so they, in some sense, streamlined what they were doing. And that got them ahead of me, and I’m still working…I’m still in Westeros.”

Hmm…somehow I think the show would still have “got ahead” of Martin even if it had included characters like Arianne Martell and the other Prince Aegon Targaryen. Sure, it would have taken them longer, but at the rate Martin writes, before long, I doubt it would have mattered.

In any case, Martin is plugging along, driving towards the ending he imagined long ago. “I’ve known the ending of my books since 1993 or so, so I’m just moving forward with the story that I’ve always intended to tell,” he said. The difference, as he detailed earlier on his trip, is that now he’s writing while dealing with the pressures of fame, which wasn’t an issue before. “[Game of Thrones has] changed my life, mostly in good ways,” he told ITV. “It’s made me famous, which is a double-edged sword, to tell you the truth. There’s a lot of great stuff about being famous, there’s a lot of other stuff that I would just have soon have skipped on.”

Maybe some of that pressure will abate now that Thrones is over, but considering just how big it got, and much influence it still has, that’ll probably take a while. For his part, Martin never saw the show becoming as successful as it was. “No one could imagine it,” he said. “It would take an act of singular arrogance to think, ‘Yes, we’re now starting something that will be the most popular television show in the world.’ You just hope, you know, it’s step by step. You write a script and you hope that they’ll pick it up and let you shoot the pilot.”

And that’s how his books will come together, too, I suspect: step by step. And so our watch continues.

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