GRRM Claims to Be 75% Done With ‘The Winds of Winter’

It’s been over 11 years since George R.R. Martin published A Dance with Dragons, the most recent novel in his unfinished epic fantasy magnum opus A Song of Ice and Fire. There have been enough delays of the next novel, The Winds of Winter, that some people have begun to fear it’ll never come out—but fret not, because GRRM claims he is 75 percent done.

“It’s a big book, I’ve said that before. It’s a challenging book. It’s probably gonna be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series,” GRRM said in a recent interview. “I think I’m about three-quarters of the way done, maybe, but that’s not 100 percent done so I have to continue working on it.”

That’s good news to hear, but not exactly news to some members of the fandom. In June, Youtuber Preston Jacobs—who is leading a collaborative fan fiction project to write The Winds of Winter—made an interesting “Pessimist’s History” video that closely tracked GRRM’s progress over the past 11 years and came to some depressing conclusions. 

The primary one is that GRRM has spent years sitting on material cut from A Dance with Dragons—12 chapters of varying length, or about 200 manuscript pages—and another 200 or so draft pages, while presenting it as material written for the new book. (When a chapter detailing psychedelic pirate Euron Greyjoy’s apparent scheme to raise a kraken from the depths by sacrificing his own relatives in a blood magic rite surfaced several years ago, for instance, these weren’t new pages, but just old ones.) This gave rise to a host of predictions from fans that calculated a publication date based on a rate of writing that was never accurate because he was not actively writing the book for a few years.

So from 2011 to 2016, there appears to have been little progress made beyond what was cut from A Dance with Dragons and those draft pages, but GRRM continued—most famously in a bleak 2016 blog post—to entertain the idea that he was close if he could just push himself a little harder. Few pages materialized.

In fact, it seems GRRM’s writing for The Winds of Winter had stalled out completely until the end of HBO’s A Game of Thrones television adaptation and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. GRRM shifted his focus to Fire and Blood, the base text for HBO’s House of Dragon television series, and combined already-written stories with 500 pages of new material to publish the history of the Targaryen dynasty. That GRRM prioritized that instead of the remaining 1,110+ pages for The Winds of Winter suggests he was at his wit’s end until relatively recently.

During the pandemic, however, GRRM claimed to have been able to have written “hundreds and hundreds” of pages, which Jacobs estimates to have come out to some 400 pages. That brings us to a grand total of about 900 pages, or close to two-thirds of The Winds of Winter—right in line with the author’s new claims. In other words, whether you go by his word or by OSINT analysis, GRRM has almost certainly made enough progress to celebrate, but not enough to offer a date.

“I’ve given up making predictions because people press me and press me: ‘when is it gonna be done?’ And I make what I think is the best-case estimate, and then stuff happens,” GRRM added in the recent interview. “Then everyone gets mad that I lied—I’ve never lied about these predictions, they’re the best I could make. But I guess I overestimate my ability to get stuff done and underestimate the amount of interruptions and other projects and other demands that will distract me.”

Perhaps the grimmest part of all this is that GRRM now asserts he may have to rewrite things he’s already written, raising the prospect that that 75 percent figure may actually tick downward as he keeps working. At the least, though, he seems to have pages.