As a writer, this means he hasn’t done shit lol
The longest he delays imo the more time he allows the tv series to taint the legacy of this story.
He’s RE-written the same 1100 pages six times over by now, I wager …
laughs in Patrick Rothfuss
He will never release it because of his hate for HBO
Hot take: It’s coming out eventually and everybody will be blindsided because nobody is expecting it anymore.
At 1,100 pages, surely there is a spot where there is a decent enough ending for him to send to publishers.
What I mean is he says he has 500ish pages to go making WoW 1,700 pages. Surely, that could be split into 2 books. It might not be optimal but he could buy himself a lot more time for those 500 pages if, say, 800 pages of his 1,100 works as a book.
Editors are too afraid to say to GRRM “Hey, this is crap. Trim it down.”
You can read the first three pages and the last three pages of any chapter from any of his books and figure out what happened in between.
Let’s be real. The guy is a 75 year-old multimillionaire. If I were him, spending hours upon hours in my office writing a book would be at the very bottom of my to do list. Below, for example, traveling around the world, eating in the best restaurants, etc. I have given up hope long ago.
Who would have thought that stuffing your story full of characters and narratives taking place over a land mass the size of Europe would be hard to end in a feasible way.
A lot easier to start than to finish, obviously.
And how would they know? The last update from him said he was working on it, why would he tell anyone he hasn’t added anything since last year? It might never be done but this is fake news anyway.
Best chance of ever seeing this book is when he finally kicks the bucket and Brandon Sanderson whips up Winds of Winter while they’re delivering the eulogy. Guy can probably have the entire series finished off by the time GRRM’ body is in the ground.
At this point I honestly think the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide before George R.R. Martin finishes Winds of Winter
“I deleted them after I was done writing them, just like last year, but I did write them.” - also George
He should just have an AI finish it for him at this point.