George R.R. Martin has made an enlightening A Dance with Dragons update while stating he now has left behind the Isle of Cedars (in Slaver’s Bay near Meereen) and that the manuscript is at 1261 pages.
That alone is notable: that’s up 56 MS from last week, leading one to assume that at least some of the chapters he completed he already had in rough or partial form. However, GRRM goes on to discuss the matter of timelines and how difficult it would be to fit A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons in a single book. Besides that, he reveals that he caught up to the timeline of A Feast for Crows at 800 MS in Dance, and everything since then has been post-Feast which is allowing him to wrap some of the cliffhangers from the previous book and continue the story further. He admits its a rather awkward structure, and that Dance directly paralleling Feast would be more elegant, but so far it’s the direction he’s taking the novel.