George R.R. Martin calls The Winds of Winter "the curse of my life"

Fans have been waiting to read The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, for well over a decade now. The last book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, came out in 2011, the same year that HBO started adapting Martin's books as Game of Thrones. The other month, Martin said that work on Winds is going "pretty well," but that he wishes it were going "faster." Understatement of the century.

Why is the book taking so long? Some fans pin it on Martin getting distracted by other things. For instance, last week, Martin revealed his involvement with Colossal Biosciences, a company that brought dire wolves, a huge species of wolves that's been extinct for thousands of years, back into the world. Direwolves are alive and well in Westeros, so there's a Martin connection there. The author traveled out to the company's headquarters to be photographed holding one of the dire wolves:

TIME brought this up with Martin in an interview, pointing out how fans were joking that we got real-life dire wolves before The Winds of Winter. "That's the curse of my life here," Martin responded. "There's no doubt Winds of Winter is 13 years late. I'm still working on it. I have periods where I make progress and then other things divert my attention...I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows. I have something else to do."

HBO is working on a number of Game of Thrones spinoff series; House of the Dragon is heading into its third season, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres this year, and we've heard they're working on a show about Aegon the Conqueror, among others. That's what Martin is referring to when he says he has a deadline for "one of the HBO shows," but we don't know which one he's talking about.

Something like that may genuinely divert Martin's attention from The Winds of Winter. However, he takes issue with fans assuming that everything he's involved with apart from Winds is a huge distraction. "I opened a book store, and people say, 'Why is George R.R. Martin opening a book store? He could be writing Winds of Winter.' I don't actually work in the book store, you know?" Martin said. "I own it, I hired people to do it...I'm not going to ring up your register. I'm not going to order what books are coming in. I have a theater. I'm not the projectionist. They seem to overestimate how much time I'm putting in these things."

It's the same with the photo op with the dire wolves. "You've heard exactly what role I've played in the dire wolf thing. I'm sitting at home, I might have been working on Winds of Winter or the screenplay, and suddenly Peter Jackson's on the line," Martin recalled. "And I hear about this and I travel out to see it. Probably the trip was, like, four days. And I flew down to Dallas and we took the tour and then we ate some barbecue. And it did not seriously impinge on the writing of Winds of Winter. But people make it seem — my more fanatic fans — as if it's one or the other. And it's not."

First up, yes, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is also involved in the dire wolf revival project; that story gets weirder and wilder the more you look into it. As for Martin, it's true that some fans do tend to jump to conclusions about distracted he may be by side projects that have little bearing on The Winds of Winter...but it's also true that The Winds of Winter is taking an eternity to write. I think we will eventually see the finished book, although I wouldn't dare venture a guess as to when. As for why it's taking so long, theories about that are legion:

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