He promised he wouldn’t do this anymore, but it looks like George RR Martin returns to the tradition of telling us about the (slight) progress around ‘Winds of winter’ (Winds of Winter), the sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire, the base material for ‘Game of Thrones’ and whose fifth installment we could read eleven years ago.
He has done it in a talk organized by the publisher Penguin Random House, where he has assured that he already has written three quarters of the novel, which will also be the longest of the entire saga.
75%
Of course, it still does not give a date for when we can read this new installment:
“It’s a big, big book, I’ve said it before. It is a challenging book. It will probably be longer than any of the other volumes in the series. ‘A Dance with Dragons’ and ‘A Storm of Swords’ are the two longest books in the series, they were around 1500 handwritten pages. I think this one is going to be longer than them by the time I’m done with it, and I think maybe? I’m three quarters of the way done. But that’s not 100 percent done, so I have to keep working on it.”
It is interesting that fact of being longer than the other two novels that, curiously, were divided into two volumes in their paperback edition in Spain. something that also could be raised for the edition of this new novel… or even do a “2×1”:
“And of course, there is the matter of my friends at Random House, when I deliver this monstrous book that will be as big as a dragon. Will they try to make me split it in two? We’ll figure it out, but first I have to finalize it, I have to get it all done.”
A division that could be somewhat dangerous if it is not done correctly or you try an experiment like the one Martin did with ‘A Feast for Crows’ and ‘A Dance with Dragons’ with each having a different set of characters as their plots ran parallel.
Edition details aside, the lifelong reader of the saga already knows that these status “updates” do not mean that we will be able to read short-term book.
On the other hand, let us remember that novels are following a different course, since the series was separated from the original material, not in the sense that there were no books anymore, but because of creative decisions and issues that are in the novels but not in the series. So a very different ending is coming.