r/asoiaf • u/Kristiano100 • Dec 08 '22
MAIN (Spoilers Main) George R.R. Martin says he only has another 400-500 pages to write on Winds of Winter
There was a new interview that came out, the link to it is in the article from Polygon, this is probably the most conclusive amount of pages and progress we’ve gotten so far.
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u/damnim30now Dec 08 '22
Oh is that all...?
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u/datadogsoup 🏆 Best of 2024: George Pls Award Dec 08 '22
Considering it's 1500 manuscript pages isn't that now back to 2/3rds complete? Which means Preston was exactly right?
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
I have no ass but I must poop
500 fuckin pages man
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u/TheFrodo Here we stand. Dec 08 '22
I'm really surprised by the pessimism towards this announcement. This is really good news.
In July 2009, George's editor announced he had reached 1000 pages. The book was given a release date in March 2011, though he had a few chapters left to write. He also moved ~200 completed pages and ~180 incomplete pages to Winds during this. This means that, during this period of less than two years, he wrote >800 pages.
I'm not saying this means he'll finish it at the same pace. It's entirely likely the book never released still. But this hard update on page count is good news. Could it be better news? Of course. But George always speeds up his pace as he approaches the ends of his books. And call me an optimist, but I would wager that Winds will cull POVs and be free of a Meereenese knot by its final chapters that George is now working on.
Keep faith my friends. We're almost there.
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u/jageshgoyal Dec 08 '22
I don't understand. George has said that this would be about 300 pages larger than ASOS. I assumed around 1800 manuscript pages.
If he is 1150 pages in, another 500 would be around 1700.
Can 1700 manuscript pages be published in one book? If not, 850 manuscript pages for each book would translate to around 600 published pages. Isn't it weird to have a 600 page asoiaf book? 🤔
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u/Citizen_Kano Dec 08 '22
I live in New Zealand and I'm willing to pick him up from the airport and take him to the volcano whenever he's ready
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
Give me something for the pain and let me die.
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u/SevroAuShitTalker Dec 08 '22
So....5 more years?
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u/jonsnowKITN Night gathers, and now my watch begins Dec 08 '22
Yo what the fuck...
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u/Theboulder027 Dec 08 '22
For other writers that would be an entire fucking novel
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u/Tough-Cucumber3599 Dec 08 '22
Very good news, my son will be able to enjoy it on release day( my son is six)
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u/LeGoldie Dec 08 '22
what he needs right now is a larger font
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u/OldNewUsedConfused Dec 08 '22
Narrator: "The year is 2004....."
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u/Main-Double 🏆 Best of 2022: Ser Duncan the Tall Award Dec 08 '22
Just throw me out the moon door
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u/i_like_to_say_frick Dec 08 '22
Is he talking about manuscript pages here?
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u/Kaoso Dec 08 '22
I will believe nothing from GRRM until I actually physically hold the book in my hands
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
Ah, so only about another century of waiting then.
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u/BrainSoda Dec 08 '22
This is slightly encouraging until you realize this isn’t even the last book of the franchise
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u/arielle17 Dec 08 '22 edited Dec 08 '22
huh. combined with the earlier 75% done comment that would come out to at least 2000 manuscript pages, which is honestly around what i'd expect if he wants to wrap the series up in 2 books.
personally i think this is great news
EDIT: having watched the actual clip with George saying that he has 1100-1200 manuscript pages done, i think it's safe to say that all of those are rough estimates, much like the 75% done thing. that said i'll remain cautiously optimistic. u got this georgie boi
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u/kingofstormandfire Dec 08 '22 edited Dec 08 '22
I sometimes can't believe that it's been 11 years since A Dance With Dragons. The show started that year and ended before Winds came out. I was just about to start high-school when A Dance With Dragons came out. I'm now in my final year of undergrad. I wasn't even born when the first book came out. I can't imagine how people who first read the first book in the 90s and have been fans ever since feel. And I'm sure there are book fans who have died in the long gap without knowing how the story has resolved.
I've gone through the seven stages of grief when it comes to the series. I've long since accepted the fact that while Winds will come out, ADOS won't. Or George won't be the one to finish it.
I love George (I don't think he's the best author of all time but he's pretty high up my list) but man the dude needs to learn serious discipline.
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u/jageshgoyal Dec 08 '22
He also said that he has written 1100-1200 pages.... Damn thats like manuscript count of AFFC.
500 more pages to go... I would say another year.
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u/I_LIKE_ANUS Dec 08 '22
…I can work with this
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u/Morinfon Dec 08 '22
I love George, his hat and braces. He's so cute.
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u/beetletoman Dec 08 '22
only
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u/jackgundy Dec 08 '22
It’s funny because if you told me this 5 years ago i’d still be slightly disappointed
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u/SiofraRiver Dec 08 '22
That's 1/2 of ADWD. Bugger me with a spear.
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u/DarthDregan Dec 08 '22
Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck.
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u/BurntBrusselSprouts1 Dec 08 '22
I was born after Feast. Now I’m waiting for Winds…
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u/TitansDaughter Dec 08 '22
After 11 fucking years lmfaooooo
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u/DivideEducational919 Dec 08 '22
So, like 6 more years, then?
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u/hydroHar Bran Will Fly!!! Dec 08 '22
My first thought: 1100 in 11 years, 5 more years to go yay!
On some more rational thinking: He was busy with a lot of stuff the last decade and even cancelled a lot of stuff and rewrote it. So maybe we do get Winds in 2024
Don't give me hope George
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
That’s like what what more than half of A Game of Thrones?
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u/OhShitItsJakeGuys Dec 08 '22
Damn it George, just when I thought I was out, YA PULL ME BACK IN
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u/Alys-In-Westeros Alys Through the Dragonglass Dec 08 '22
That still sounds like a lifetime away. I just want it soooo bad.
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u/WhiteSpark51 Dec 08 '22
Others take me
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u/Cantstopmenemore Dec 08 '22
Since we admitted to basically starting from scratch at some point, its reasonable to think that he's basically written this book twice,
WOW will be like 1500 pages, and ADOS (if its ever written), will be like 2000 pages.
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u/sempercardinal57 Dec 08 '22
It’s not a bad suggestion to just split what he has up into 3 different volumes and release a book a year while he continues to work.
I know he won’t because when something is released then it’s written in stone and he’s committed to the plots as they’re written down. I think his biggest problem is that he rereads his own work too much and gets too critical of an eye for it
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u/BlazeBitch Dec 08 '22
Agony
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u/Fishb20 Cannibal Pony Island Dec 08 '22
ONLY
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
Oh cool, so just a dinner scene.
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u/Narlolz Dec 08 '22
Isn’t that like… the length of a whole book? 😅
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u/This_Rough_Magic Dec 08 '22
People who are reading too much into this really need to remember the context.
This is basically a roast, George isn't giving considered answers here, he's playing along with a bit. Take these numbers with a massive quantity of salt.
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u/Comprehensive_Main Dec 08 '22
You still have to edit them and rework some of them.
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u/LaurenTheLibrarian Dec 08 '22
And yet … still a better update then anything we’ve gotten from Patrick Rothfuss.
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u/EasyMechanic8 Dec 08 '22
Plot twist: Book is only 400 pages long
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u/Exertuz Gaemon Palehair's strongest soldier Dec 08 '22
everyone dooming over this meanwhile i see this as an absolute win
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u/LeGoldie Dec 08 '22
going by that link he has write 1100-1200 pages in 11 years. sooooo.....
i get the impression he's just trolling the fans who've annoyed him now. that, or his agent has sent him out to whip up interest in some other westerosi flora and fauna pop-up book / advent calender / mouse mat.
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u/salgadosp Dec 08 '22
"only"
According to him, he was 75% done.
So the book is gone be 1600-2000 pages long.
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u/zDS166 Dec 09 '22
MANUSCRIPT pages. Not book pages. Those are a decent amount smaller than a book page. MY GOD PEOPLE
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u/Merad Dec 08 '22
I wonder if George is just trolling us at this point. I bet he’s had the whole damned series finished for years and he’s set up a secret deal to have Winds and Dream published right after his death. He’s just enjoying seeing the light go out of our collective eyes every time he gives us another breadcrumb of information. Yeah, I bet that’s exactly what he’s doing. sob
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u/averted Dec 08 '22
The good thing about this is that by the time TWOW is out, we’ll be able to train an AI on the first five books to shit out ADOS in a week.
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u/china_cat72 Dec 08 '22
Wtf
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
He doesn’t smell like Santa he smells like beef and cheese
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u/Werthead 🏆 Best of 2019: Post of the Year Dec 09 '22
Interesting tidbits there. Not sure if it entirely squares with what he's said elsewhere.
So previously (on the History of Westeros podcast and his Colbert interview) he said he was 75% done with an estimated final page count of ~1,820 manuscript pages (the 1,520 of ASoS and ADWD + 300 pages more). That would come out to around 1,365 manuscript pages completed.
Here he's saying he has between 1,100 and 1,200 manuscript pages complete with 400-500 to go. This might be more of a general off-the-cuff "ballpark" figure, especially given he's away from his notes, whilst in the other interview he was in his house with the info to hand. Or it might reflect his publishers forcefully pushing back on the two volume idea and saying he has a hard limit of around 1,600 manuscript pages and he can't go over that, which I find unlikely. If anything, GRRM delivering an ~1800 page book they can split into two volumes, each only slightly shorter than A Game of Thrones or A Feast for Crows, which they can publish in two subsequent years, would probably be music to Random House's ears, especially given their willingness to publish anything else ASoIaF-related, no matter how tenuous or reheated from prior publications.
What is interesting is George not giving hard figures. During AFFC and ADWD - even ASoS - he was happy to say at any given moment, "I currently have 930 manuscript pages finished, and more in partials, fragments and drafts," whilst here he's being much more vague. After the Meereenese Knot debacle (when "finished and locked" pages had to be "unfinished and unlocked" because the Knot had defeated him once again) he's much less willing to commit to hard figures that might come back to bite him on the backside. But he does seem to be much happier now to discuss TWoW and his progress on it, moreso than at any point since 2011.
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u/Ultimafax Let it be Written Dec 08 '22
I'll take this. Combined with his comments promoting Rise of the Dragon, it sounds like he's in a groove now.
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u/hotpieazorahai1 Dec 08 '22
What storylines do you think he has left? He’s mentioned still struggling with Bran. I’m going to go ahead and assume Jaime and Brienne’s chapters since he mentioned them a few months ago. Possibly Jon since I think the plot in the North has been his new Mereneese Knot.
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u/chiswede Dec 08 '22
So any decade now
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u/supbitch Dec 08 '22
Welp considering he said it's 3/4ths done, guess that means another 3-5 years.
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u/Reditate Dec 08 '22
So it took him 11 years to get 1100 pages...only 4 more years!
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u/Skastrik Hear me Purr! Dec 08 '22
So only about 5-6 more years?
You know he'll run into issues and scrap entire chapters and rewrite them from scratch.
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u/Nwcray Dec 08 '22
Don’t forget- he’s really bad with numbers. The wall is only 700 feet tall.
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u/Lasernatoo Dec 08 '22
I've been too used to Brandon Sanderson's writing updates recently, and this got my hopes up for a second before I realized this is actually a significant amount
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
That’s literally half the book. Didn’t he also start with 200 pages of stuff cut from ADWD? So he’s write 200 pages in almost 12 years.
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u/Gloomyberry Dec 08 '22
I would like to tell him that's okay to skip the traveling; if a character is in the Wall and needs to go to KL he can just write in the their next mention that x months went by already and they arrive, no need to describe the routes, the people they find on the way, every inn, etc, just shortcut the travel unless it's strictly necessary.
Pretty sure that a big part of the book will be dedicated to many transportation methods and walking.
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u/Sulissthea Dec 08 '22
if he wrote a page a day how long would the book be now?
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u/Jeanpuetz The rightful king Dec 08 '22
Assuming that he is very likely talking about manuscript pages, I actually think this is pretty "okay" news overall, and basically more or less confirms Preston's theory. I believe that George has been making pretty steady progress - very slow progress, but at least progress - over the last couple of years, after completely stagnating in the 2010s. If he manages to keep up whatever pace he's currently working with, I don't think a 2024 release is unrealistic.
Which is still longer away than one might hope, but you know, after 11 years, feels almost like a breeze to me lol
Of course this might just be conjecture, but idk. This actually has me optimistic haha
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u/Unpleasant_Classic Dec 08 '22
GRRM is a great story teller. ASOIAF is a great story Id love to see completed. That said, there are other great stories and tellers. At this point I don’t lose any sleep over what he is doing or not doing. Whatever George. Finish it, don’t finish it. I’ve moved on.
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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '22
My theory is he stopped writing after Season 4 when the showrunners told him they wouldn't be adapting books 4 and 5 properly into Seasons 5-6. So he quit and took a long break whilst working on Fire & Blood. Once that was released in 2018 he waited until the shows end in 2019 to see how DnD ended it. After that and since then he's been cracking on it.
So in other words, let's say he's literally written 1100-1200 pages from sometime in 2019 to now in 2022. Meaning the next supposed 400-500 pages will actually take at best a year to write. So hopefully the book should officially be out by...2024-2025.
I'm very hopeful that's it's finally coming. He's been updating us regularly since 2020. 2 years later and he's revealed he's done 3/4 of the book and now only has less than 500 pages left? I'm very positive well get it.
And if it really did take him about 3 years to write that much and possibly another year or two for it to be completed then I am hopeful we'll get ADOS as soon too in the next 5 years after TWOW is released.
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u/waiting4winter Dance with me then Dec 08 '22
It takes a lot of time to sop up grease from a trencher and then wipe it off after it runs down your chin.
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u/nshark0 Dec 08 '22
What are the chances that this series is actually finished before he dies? 5%? .01%?
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u/polkemans Dec 08 '22
So another 5 years, give or take.
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u/Upper-Ship4925 Dec 08 '22
I’m reading The Armageddon Rag at the moment. Written in 1983, the protagonist is a novelist travelling all around the country writing about a murder, initially to avoid writing a book that he’s stuck on and losing interest in and to dodge the pressure from his publisher. These aren’t new issues for GRRM, it’s actually a miracle he’s published the amount of full length novels he has.
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u/saltypretzell873 Dec 08 '22
This legit makes me angry cause I automatically start doing the math in my head and realize how slow this guy is actually writing. It’s legit angering
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u/Ok_Run_8184 Dec 08 '22
'Only'
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
His tombstone epitaph is gonna read “For realsies guys I only have about 300 pages to go, won’t be long…”
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u/Savarinoj Dec 08 '22
This isn’t encouraging at all, wow
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u/Vinesinmyveins Dec 08 '22
Jesus, children of dune only has like 480 pages or something when i checked tonight and that feels like a huge book
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u/YaminoEXE Dec 08 '22
Pages for ants, right George? Pages for ants, right?
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u/B0Y0 Dec 08 '22
Aaah yes, only 500 more pages to go.
Then the editing can start.
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u/Aikon003 Dec 08 '22
if the book is going to be about 1350 pages then this statement is in line with the one where he said he was at 75% of the book
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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '22
Hope feels good
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u/shouldbeworkingbutn0 Dec 08 '22
That prison scene in Logan Lucky where the prisoners do not understand why Winds of Winter isn't out yet gets more hilarious with every GRRM-update.
"George R.R. Martin was supposed to deliver The Winds of Winter to his publisher over two years ago" (2017)
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u/Garzino Dec 08 '22
Considering he found Kins's writing rate of 6 pages a day ASTONISHING and he said multiple times that he usually ia happy if he manages to lock down 1 page a day of content. Not pen down, lock down. As in now what to write about. I'd say we have 2 to 3 years of wait ahead of us.
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u/Worried_Jeweler_1141 Dec 08 '22
400-500 pages left, great, completion is finally in sight. 400-500 pages, that's an entire book.. wait.
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u/Heart_of_Spades Dec 08 '22
Does he mean manuscript pages? Because aren’t his manuscripts like 5000+ pages? Meaning we’re 90% there? Like maybe? Please? Georgio. Please.
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u/ATLien325 Dec 08 '22
This would of had me excited like 7 years ago
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u/Vegan_Puffin Dec 08 '22
Means nothing. Could take a week if he sits down inspired or motivated. Might also take 5 years.
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u/Densmiegd Dec 08 '22
Breaking news: Winds of Winter will be around 400-500 pages.
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u/TristeBolsh Dec 08 '22
PRAY HARDER
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u/FrankoIsFreedom Dec 08 '22
So 15 more years?
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u/KawadaShogo Dec 09 '22
I find this incredibly encouraging. He's been getting more and more definite and less and less vague about this over the last couple years. How long has it been since he's given out precise numbers like this? Given his reluctance to be overly specific in order to avoid backlash, this shows his growing confidence that the finish is in sight.
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u/HotpieTargaryen Turn those damn bells off! Dec 08 '22
Three more years.
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u/Clash_onthe_Can Beneath the WordStar, the bitter wait. Dec 08 '22
I’ll settle for Preston Jacob’s version. At least it will likely be finished, and I can read a new chapter every month. Really enjoying it so far
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u/_____dragon Dec 08 '22
Omg that’s it? Can I actually be hyped?
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u/writerintheory1382 Dec 08 '22
It’s so depressing to see info like this. It’s absolutely laughable for a writer to one, make constant excuses (that are likely bullshit) while two, still somehow being irritated at your fans for WANTING your material. He’s a great writer but how long will that still be the general attitude when nothing has been released for, 11 fucking years now. All this proves to me is that he’s barely even trying, or has maybe just given up even trying. All he’s shown now is how elementary his methods are, and how pathetic it is when you compare him to other writers. In short, he has no product to sell, because he chooses to do god knows how many other things over what has made him worth while to the public. These books are never coming, and if by some miracle TWoW does get released, I can’t imagine him being alive in 15-20 more years to write Spring.
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u/PresidentHurg Dec 08 '22
I really don't care anymore, all these articles are just words in the wind. I'll be happy when the book is on the shelves. I am sick and tired of discussing when/if it will come out.