George R.R Martin is a world renowned figure due to his A Song of Ice and Fire series. He made an announcement in May 2005 that his upcoming book, the fourth entry in the saga, ‘A Feast of Crows’ has grown so large that it has become un-publishable.
As a result, it will be split into two different books. This resulted in Crows coming out a year later and its other half, A Dance with Dragons, was released six years later.
After coming across Martin’s latest blog post that the follow-up for Dragons’, named Winds of Winter, won’t be coming anytime soon. Considering the past trends, you shouldn’t be too surprised.
Ever since 2005, something changed for GRRM and that was when the HBO popular TV Series, Game of Thrones came into existence. Due to this show, his books managed to reach astronomical levels of fame, all over the world.
After the premiere of the first season, A Dance with Dragons was released in 2011. At the moment, all of Martin’s books have been adopted for television and in the meantime, the sixth season which will be releasing this spring will enter completely unmapped territory for both viewers and readers alike.
Some fans were hopeful that Martin might be able to bring out his sixth book before the return of this show in spring. Sadly, Martin declared that he had blown the end-of-the-year deadline which indicated the latest date when he could hand his book to the publisher, for a March release.
Therefore, right now it is official that Game of Thrones will be telling the story faster than he can write. As a result, it will conclude before all his novels have been published. Martin wrote that he still had hopes of doing it but the days and weeks went faster compared to the increase of the pages he wrote.
He further became unsatisfied with some earlier choices and began revising as well. Before he knew it, it was October and November and the general suspicion was that he won’t be able to make it.
Due to this, he became depressed and started struggling even more. It is clear that nobody likes a deadline, just as Martin but the internet offered to help when it came to diagnosing his problems.
There are several things which make it highly challenging to recount events of a global scale. These include his politicking, sprawling narrative of war, expansion of revenge with every sequel, along with his gimmick of telling each chapter from the POV of a single character.
There is a complicated bit of storytelling which is focused around the fictional city of Mereen which is referred by him as the Meereenese Knot.
This took place in A Dance with Dragons and took a lot of years to untangle. Since he has planned his books in a proper manner, Martin should focus on moving his grand saga to a final conclusion with the release of ‘Winds of Winter’. This will definitely take some time as the process will involve tying up hundreds of various story threads.