George R.R. Martin has 400 or 500 pages to go on The Winds of Winter

I know, I know, you’re tired and don’t want another vague update obout The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga. You’ve heard it all before, and it doesn’t change the fact that it’s been over a decade since A Dance With Dragons came out. But George R.R. Martin gave us an update, and so an update you shall have!

The Song of Ice and Fire author appeared on Stephen Colbert’s Tooning Out the News last night, where animated host Dr. Ike Bloom (voiced by Ikechukwu Ufomadu) roasted Martin for his slow writing speed. Martin also got some tough love advice from none other than James Patterson, the bestselling author known for churning out novels with clockwork regularity. (These days Patterson uses an army of coauthors to keep up that reputation, but that’s beside the point.)

George R.R. Martin has over a thousand pages of The Winds of Winter written, still hundreds to go

Martin is a pretty good sport here, as Dr. Ike Bloom lambasts him for being “a struggling writer — let me revise that, truly pathetic — who is having trouble meeting deadlines.” Fortunately, Bloom has the connections and calls up Patterson to help.

The back-and-forth between Patterson and Martin is pretty funny, as Martin fills in the renowned crime fiction writer on his situation. Martin admits that his deadline was “11 years ago”; that’s part of the gag, since 11 years ago was when A Dance with Dragons came out and there’s no way Martin’s deadline for Winds was that same year. Patterson laughs, saying that he’d heard of writer’s block but that it sounds like what Martin has is closer to “writer’s constipation.”

“I have the opposite problem, I suffer from writer’s diarrhea,” says Patterson, before host Dr. Ike Bloom warns the author not to besmirch irritable bowel movements by associating them with his work.

Martin then recounts his process for Patterson, including how he writes on his trusty DOS computer with the Wordstar word processing program, which has been Martin’s habit for years. “Try something else, then, ’cause that’s not working,” Patterson glibly suggests.

The highlight comes when Patterson asks Martin how many pages he has done, to which Martin replies, “Eh, like 1,100, 1,200, something like that…it’s not done yet though. I need another 400 [or] 500 pages.”

That gives Patterson an idea. “Your problem’s solved!” he says. “You break down the 1,100 pages into three books… You submit one book per year, they’ll be happy, and suddenly you’ll be ahead of schedule!”

The Winds of Winter is not coming out in 2022

That’s not dissimilar from what happened with Martin’s last two Song of Ice and Fire books A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons, which were originally supposed to be one book but got broken up as deadlines came and went and Martin had miles left to go. Will it happen again? Who knows?

We know that Martin has made a lot of progress on Winds over the past few years, and has been talking about it more openly in public of late. Recently he said the book was around “three quarters of the way done.” But given how long it took him to get there, there’s no guarantee there will be any kind of sprint to the finish.

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