The Winds of Winter Update: George R.R. Martin Admits Naysayers 'Might Be Right' About Never Finishing TWOW

George R.R. Martin has again raised doubts about whether The Winds of Winter will ever be finished, telling The Hollywood Reporter in December 2024 that naysayers who claim he will die before completing the book 'might be right,' even as he insists the long-delayed Game of Thrones novel remains a priority.

The 75-year-old author, speaking from his home base in Santa Fe, admitted he is now 13 years late on the sixth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire and still wrestling with hundreds of remaining pages.

Readers have been waiting since July 2011, when A Dance with Dragons hit shelves and left Jon Snow bleeding in the snow, Tyrion drifting east and Daenerys stranded in Meereen. Back then, Martin confidently told interviewers he expected The Winds of Winter to follow within about three years. Instead, the book has become an epic in its own right, not on the page but in public, with blog posts, missed deadlines, side projects and a mounting sense that the author and his creation are trapped in each other's shadow.

The Winds of Winter Becomes A Moving Target

The chronology of The Winds of Winter is almost its own saga. As early as June 2010, Martin said he had four chapters already done, including Arya, Sansa and two from the Dornish princess Arianne Martell. A month later he reported 'more than a hundred pages' written. In 2012, brimming with optimism, he told a Spanish outlet he had 400 pages and was 'really looking forward' to a 2014 publication, though he conceded only about half of those were truly finished.

By 2015 Martin was saying he hoped to beat HBO's sixth season to the punch, calling that race 'important to me all along' and cancelling convention appearances to focus on the book. Then, in January 2016, the tone shifted. In a downbeat blog post he revealed he had blown two publisher deadlines in 2015, including one on Halloween and another at year's end. 'I tried, I promise you,' he wrote. 'I failed.'

From there, the pattern hardened. A 2017 blog entry floated yet another hopeful prediction that The Winds of Winter would be out 'this year.' undercut in parentheses by his own aside that he had thought the same 12 months earlier. Soon Winds was no longer alone in his schedule. He paused work to finish Fire & Blood, the Targaryen history that appeared in 2018 and later became the spine of House of the Dragon. That November he admitted to Entertainment Weekly he had endured 'dark nights of the soul' wondering if he would ever finish the main series, even as he holed up in what The Wall Street Journal described as a remote mountain retreat.

If anything, success made things worse. By 2022 Martin was candid that Westeros had 'become bigger than The Winds of Winter,' with multiple spin-off shows, a second Fire & Blood volume and more 'Dunk & Egg' novellas all competing for his time. He still called Winds his 'top priority' and in October 2022 went as far as saying he was 'about three-quarters of the way done,' with roughly 1,100 to 1,200 manuscript pages in hand and perhaps 400 or 500 more to go. But a year later, he admitted he was stuck on the same page count, joking that perhaps he should have written shorter books.

The Winds of Winter And The Weight Of Expectation

The longer the delay has stretched, the more The Winds of Winter has become a kind of public burden. The pandemic years briefly looked promising: Martin said 2020 was his best year on the book, with 'hundreds and hundreds of pages' written, only to add that he still had 'hundreds more' to go and 'a zillion other things to do as well.' Those other things have multiplied. He has co-authored a peer-reviewed physics paper, invested in short films based on his late friend Howard Waldrop, agreed to produce an Elden Ring film and thrown himself into HBO's expanding slate of Westeros dramas.

At the same time, the cultural pressure has curdled. In Seattle in 2025, a convention attendee stood up at a Q&A, told Martin he was 'not going to be around for much longer' and asked how he felt about Brandon Sanderson finishing his series. The crowd booed. The question, though, surfaced the anxiety that now dogs every update: time. Martin himself has joked about being 'imprisoned' on a volcanic island if he missed earlier self-imposed deadlines, but when he now concedes that maybe the doomsayers are right, it lands more heavily.

He does not sound ready to walk away. In early 2026 he told The Hollywood Reporter that abandoning the novel would 'feel like a total failure' and that there are no plans for another writer to complete A Song of Ice and Fire if something happens to him. In an appearance at the Oxford Union that same month, he promised again that the books 'are not going to end' the way HBO's divisive final season did, drawing applause from an audience that clearly still cares what his version looks like.

Yet his own language around has grown stark. Speaking to Time in 2025, he called it 'the curse of my life.' In 2026, he admitted the writing is getting harder, that he is 'rewriting' and 'struggling,' and that he is 'so far behind on everything.' He has talked about cutting back on side projects to 'clear my decks,' while also conceding that some days he is simply 'not in the mood' for the book that everyone else insists is his destiny.

Against this fraught backdrop, even rumours acquire strange power. In April 2026, an anonymous post on X claimed a release date leak was imminent, enough to whip sections of the fandom into a familiar frenzy before Martin's US publisher Bantam Books stepped in to say flatly that the supposed leak was 'false.' Months earlier, a lawsuit Martin joined against OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement produced its own peculiar footnote. He stressed that 'no computer will ever write The Winds of Winter,' a defiant line that, as International Business Times noted, only underlined how unfinished the manuscript still is.

In mid‑2025 he suggested to Penguin Random House that the manuscript might be closing in on 1,500 pages, potentially making it the longest book in the series and, in theory, within sight of the finish line. But with fresh television seasons underway, new novellas germinating in his 'fucking head' and fresh distractions flickering into view, even that cautiously hopeful note comes hedged with an old, familiar warning. It is a 'challenging book,' he said. Fans of The Winds of Winter have learned not to hear that as anything close to a date.