George R.R. Martin is maybe one of the most recognisable faces of modern fantasy—a prolific writer who made a little something called Game of Thrones, he's also worked on TV shows, movies, and even games, providing the overarching mythos for Elden Ring. A host of characters and stories which, naturally, were turned into a host of twisted monstrosities once Miyazaki got his collaborative hands on them.
He's also under a lot of pressure. A Song of Ice and Fire, the seven-book epic that began with A Game of Thrones (hence the TV adaptation's name), has only five books written so far. The most recent tome, A Dance with Dragons, arrived in 2011. If you've got a calendar handy, you might recognise that it's 2025, nearly a decade and a half later.
He's not just been twiddling his thumbs, mind, but in a recent blog post to his website wherein he reveals he's working on an adaptation of Howard Waldrop's A Dozen Tough Jobs, he, uh, goes on a bit of a tangent.
After announcing that he'll be working on the adaptation, Martin proceeds to use the mother of all opening brackets to tear into hypothetical (though no doubt extant) fans who keep asking him why he hasn't written The Winds of Winter, yet. I don't usually do this, but I think it's important to quote it here in its entirety—it's also important to state that Waldrop is a late and dear friend of Martin's, who died in 2024.
"(I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or The Winds of Winter. You have given up on me, or on the book. I will never finish [The Winds of Winter]. If I do, I will never finish A Dream of Spring. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me…"
Deep breaths, we're not halfway done yet.
"I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money. I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards. You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, 'A Song for Lya' and Dying of the Light, 'Sandkings' and Beauty and the Beast, 'This Tower of Ashes' and 'The Stone City,' Old Mars and Old Venus and Rogues and Warriors and Dangerous Women and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois.
"You don’t care about any of those, I know. You don’t care about anything but Winds of Winter. You've told me so often enough)."
While this might come off as Martin very much losing his temper, I certainly don't envy the guy—to've authored something as culturally titanic as A Song of Ice and Fire, then to be asked to finish it, especially as the gap between books grows wider and wider? Moreover, I sympathise with his frustration at the idea that because he hasn't completed something, he doesn't care about it. Something I don't think is true at all, and something he emphatically rallies against:
"Thing is, I do care about them. And I care about Westeros and Winds as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine."
It might simply be the project he's on now that has him feeling existential. Waldrop, a fellow writer and science fiction author, was a longtime friend of Martin, and he died aged 77 of a stroke in January 2024. You can read Martin's very touching tribute to him here, where he wrote: "We are making a couple of other Waldrop adaptations as well, and I promised him I’d get him a cut of those as well before the end of January. I never dreamed when hanging up that we would never speak again."
I won't pretend to be in the man's head, or speak for him. However, if I was in the middle of adapting a late friend's work, only to have some complete stranger bark at me for not finishing a book? It'd boil my blood somethin' fierce. Martin ends his post by linking to a Hollywood Reporter piece on the upcoming adaptation, concluding: "I hope we do him justice. How can we not? Hercules, Howard, Joe, Lion Forge… I wish you all could share my excitement at the prospect of this movie."
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