Game of Thrones author George RR Martin is aware fans are upset about the delay in the release of The Winds of Winter and is pushing back against the complaint that he doesn’t care about the characters and the story anymore.
Martin, 76, announced on his blog on Wednesday that he was producing an adaptation of his late friend Howard Waldrop's A Dozen Tough Jobs.
The novella, a retelling of the Greek story of The Labours of Hercules set in Depression-era American south, is being adapted into an animated feature, which will be written by Joe R Lansdale.
As happens almost every time he announces a project not related to The Winds of Winter, the sixth instalment and penultimate book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, Martin starts the usual complaints.
The first novel in the series, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996 and the fifth, A Dance with Dragons, in 2011.
“I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or The Winds of Winter. You have given up on me, or on the book,” Martin said.
“I will never finish Winds, If I do, I will never finish A Dream of Spring. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me,” he continued, detailing the typical comments he has received over the years.
“I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a s*** about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money.”
Listing some of the projects that he has worked on in this period, Martin said, “I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards. You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers. You don’t care about any of those, I know. You don’t care about anything but Winds of Winter. You’ve told me so often enough.”
Rebuffing the statement that the books were taking so long because he had stopped caring about them, Martin said: “Thing is, I do care about them. And I care about Westeros and Winds as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine.”
He ended with a simple request: “I wish you all could share my excitement at the prospect of this movie.”
Martin started working on The Winds of Winter in 2010 and previously told fans they could expect a big announcement when it was done.
He has since expressed “fury and despair” about his progress on the book and has struggled to find “solace” in his writing.
.jpg)
In April this year, an American biotech firm claimed to have successfully brought back a dire wolf from extinction, leading fans to joke that they got “real dire wolves before Winds of Winter”.
When asked about these comments in an interview with Time, a dismayed Martin said: “That’s the curse of my life. There’s no doubt Winds of Winter is 13 years late. I’m still working on it. I’ve periods where I make progress and then other things divert my attention and suddenly I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows, I have something else to do.”
In 2022, he called The Winds of Winter a “big, big book”. “It’s a challenging book,” he said. “It’s probably going to be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series.” Promisingly, he divulged that he was about “three-quarters of the way done”.
A seventh and final book, A Dream of Spring, is set to follow afterwards.
