Everything George R.R Martin is working on besides “The Winds of Winter”

Short films

George R.R Martin is also involved as a producer of short films. According to his IMDb, he’s currently producing two short films, the details of which are completely under wraps.

Friends Forever isn’t written by Martin. He serves as an executive producer. The film is a sci-fi short with characters named “Goonybird,” “Howard Hamster,” and “Woof Woof.” From what can be found about it online, it seems to have the sort of strange dark humor that Martin is fond of. Martin is also executive producer on a short film called Ugly Chickens, a drama that features the talents of Felicia Day, known for The Guild and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.

Martin also produced a sci-fi short called Night of the Cooters in 2022; that’s the teaser trailer above. That one starred Vincent D’Onofrio. It appears he’s got the itch.

The betterment of Santa Fe, New Mexico

George R.R. Martin lives enthusiastically in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I say “enthusiastically” because he doesn’t just putter around the house; Martin is an active part of the community, and lots of stuff going on around town, including:

• Martin owns the Jean Cocteau Cinema, which shows classic movies. The Jean Cocteau is attached to…
• Beastly Books, a bookstore where Martin sells autographed copies of books and hosts authors. It’s name in honor of the 1980s TV series Beauty and the Beast, on which Martin worked as a writer.
• Maritn is involved with Meow Wolf, a local…artists’ collective? Honestly I’m not sure how to describe it but here’s what the website says:

"We have numerous full-time artists on staff, working in a huge range of media, including sculpture, painting, fabrication, digital art, writing, film, and many more. Additionally, we prioritize collaboration with many local artists in each exhibition location."

Finally, we have to mention that Martin teamed up with a couple other local notables to buy and refurbish the Santa Fe Southern Railway pretty much just for fun. Maritn is basically Santa Fe’s Santa Claus.

Lawsuit against OpenAI

This isn’t something we expect will take up too much of Martin’s time, but it’s worth mentioning: Martin has joined authors like John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen in suing OpenAI, the company behind the generative AI program ChatGPT. The authors are alleging “mass-scale copyright infringement” of their work by OpenAI.

ChatGPT works by reading text from the internet, synthesizing it, and then rearranging it in response to simple prompts from users. ChatGPT works because it uses text written by human writers, including books by Martin and others. Since those books are copyrighted and ChatGPT crawled them without permission or remuneration, Martin and his co-plaintiffs are claiming that OpenAI violated the law.

This is one of a few lawsuits testing the legality of ChatGPT and other generative AI programs. You can find more details on Martin’s case here. Again, Martin won’t be working on this case personally — that’s a job for his lawyers — but it is something he cares about.

Patience, My Friends

It can be difficult, frustrating, and maybe even infuriating to wait for so long to read the next entry in such a beloved series. But everyone’s human, and it’s not fair to expect George R.R. Martin to devote all his time to just one thing. Throughout his career, he’s always worked on a large variety of projects and he’s more busy now at 74 than he’s ever been.

There is a lot to look forward to from the Song of Ice and Fire series and the Game of Thrones universe in general, not to mention plenty of stuff Martin is involved with set outside of Westeros. And while we sample that…we wait.

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