George RR Martin Suggests 'Winds Of Winter' Book Will Be Ready In 2021

Fans of the book series A Song of Ice and Fire, better known for its television adaptation Game of Thrones, may get a new installment soon, relatively speaking. Author George R.R. Martin is a notoriously slow writer, having penned the first book in the series back in 1991. There are seven planned books, but only five have been published to date. That may change next year.

The fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series is called "A Dance with Dragons" — it was published nearly a decade ago in 2011. That book took a huge six years for Martin to complete, a figure that pales in comparison to the nine years that fans have been waiting for book six, "The Winds of Winter." Once the sixth novel is finally finished, Martin will start on "A Dream of Spring," which, presumably, will also take a frustrating number of years to complete.

In a blog post this week, Martin shared some information about his effort, stating that, "If nothing else, the enforced isolation [caused by the pandemic] has helped me write." The author says he is making 'steady progress' on "The Winds of Winter," clocking multiple hours every day.

Martin says he has been staying in a cabin in the mountains and that while "I still have a long way to go" toward finishing the novel, he hopes to have finished "The Winds of Winter" by the next CoNZealand event that will take place in 2021. "I finished a new chapter yesterday, another one three days ago, another one the previous week," Martin says, "But no, this does not mean that the book will be finished tomorrow or published next week."

The author teases that "The Winds of Winter" will be a 'huge' book when it is finally published. Fans, of course, have become jaded at this point, having had their hopes raised and destroyed multiple times over the years. The Game of Thrones HBO TV show is finished, but there is at least one prequel in the pipeline based on the same universe.