Westeros
The 'A Song of Ice and Fire' Domain
News
In a new Not a Blog post titled “Writing, Reading, Writing”, GRRM has written from his cabin hideaway about his isolation during the global pandemic. In the course of being up there, his assistant captured two mice that they’ve now made into pets named Timmy and TomTom, and George notes they have not been too helpful in advising him on The Winds of Winter...
... but he actually has a deal to say about the progress he has made, even if he thinks he won’t be able to recapture the blazing rate of speed in which he wrote A Storm of Swords (which peaked at about 150 manuscript pages a month).
Here’s what he has to say:
“If nothing else, the enforced isolation has helped me write. I am spending long hours every day on THE WINDS OF WINTER, and making steady progress. I finished a new chapter yesterday, another one three days ago, another one the previous week. But no, this does not mean that the book will be finished tomorrow or published next week. It’s going to be a huge book, and I still have a long way to go. Please do not give any credence to any of the click-bait websites that like to parse every word of my posts as if they were papal encyclicals to divine hidden meanings.”
And below the fold, here’s some additional details that are slightly spoilerish in nature:
“In between tapings, I return to Westeros. Of late I have been visiting with Cersei, Asha, Tyrion, Ser Barristan, and Areo Hotah. I will be dropping back into Braavos next week. I have bad days, which get me down, and good days, which lift me up, but all in all I am pleased with the way things are doing.
“I do wish they would go faster, of course. Way way back in 1999, when I was deep in the writing of A STORM OF SWORDS, I was averaging about 150 pages of manuscript a month. I fear I shall never recapture that pace again. Looking back, I am not sure how I did it then. A fever indeed.
“Mostly, it’s just me in Westeros, with occasional side trips to other places in the pages of a great book.
“Now you will have to excuse me. Arya is calling. I think she means to kill someone.”
Slowly but surely, The Winds of Winter draw nearer.
In other news, George does remark on the status of various television projects, indicating that The House of the Dragon is advancing well… and he notes that he’s involved in trying to “relaunch” the Wild Cards TV series project. That one caught our eye. At last year’s Worldcon and Euro Con, George and the Wild Card writers on hand sounded pleased with the direction things were going. Does “relaunch” in this case merely refer to starting up the writer’s room again if it was shut down due to the pandemic? Or is it something more ominous?
Tags: Wild Cards, The Winds of Winter, Hulu, House of the Dragon, HBO, GRRM, Game of Thrones, ASoIaF A Song of Ice and Fire • George R.R. Martin • House of the Dragon • Other Books and Projects | PermaLink