You sound like my friend speculating ten years ago that he must be writing both of the last two books together because its taking so long. Summer child. He’d publish the book as soon as its done, but it never will be.
He seems to want to continually rewrite them because "I read the chapter and its not very good”, but preston jacobs summed it up after one of their chapters: “It is really hard to write a clever character like Tyrion, and that is what he has stalled on”.
I suspect this is accurate, but I have hope that the Dunk and Egg books are much, much easier to write and the success of this show will drive him to write at least a few more…
Not just the success, but he has actually obviously enjoyed working with someone who is not butchering his story and is mostly sticking to what’s on the page while keeping him heavily involved.
In fairness to show runners, this one is much, much smaller in scale and thus requiring of many fewer compromises for the sake of budget, story, and filming limitations.
Yeah, I don’t even think House of the Dragon is bad or anything, but it is very clear Martin HATES it.
I think this is part of it but AIUI the main problem is that he now just has too many characters spread over too great a distance - the finale of necessity means bringing them all back together so they’re in the right place at the right time with the right experiences behind them, and it’s basically impossible to do that.
The fundamental problem is that while the TV show made most of the kids late teenagers so that they were plausible young adults by the time they were leading armies, freeing slaves etc., in the books they are canonically young teens verging on tweens. The original plan was literally just to jump forward five years but he decided not to do that (i.e. to fill in those years in more or less real time) and now there is Just Too Much that has to happen, people have to cross huge distances to interact, the dragons aren’t fully mature yet etc. etc. The other change the TV show made was to start ignoring travel time, which got them a lot of flack from detail-oriented fans but honestly was the only way to have people show up where they needed to be.
I’m honestly surprised Martin wouldn’t prefer to write some nice neat self-contained Dunk and Egg stories. As it is, he is completely within his rights to decide that sorting out “the Mereneese knot” is incredibly tedious work that he’d frankly rather not do.
You called it. As Martin would say “words are wind”. It has already been reported that Martin has changed his mind. Sometime in mid 2025 Martin started work on “The Village Hero” a Dunk and Egg story in the Riverlands. He isn’t exclusively working on that, however, and has been switching back and forth between it and Winds.
I assume that GRRM was distracted from the slog of writing by the giant stacks of television money and what that can buy.
At this point he’s got way more money than he knows what to do with. He’s opening bars and theaters and wolf reserves and train lines and buying movie props and whatever else he feels like. He already has so much that he can’t figure out what to do with it all.
As a writer, I believe him when he says the writing has just gotten really hard. We’ll see.
I read somewhere that there are a couple of uber-fans of the novels that he uses to check whether he’s contradicting himself, because even he can’t remember everything.
That is true. They helped him write The World of Ice and Fire which was the basis of Blood & Fire. He talks about them in the Afterword of Blood & Fire.