If you were hoping to see The Winds of Winter, the latest chapter of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy saga A Song of Ice And Fire, hitting bookstores this year, then the author has some bad news for you in his LiveJournal, revealing that he’s still “months away” from completing the novel, but expects to have at least one Westeros book out in 2018.
“I am still working on [The Winds of Winter], I am still months away (how many? good question), I still have good days and bad days, and that’s all I care to say,” said Martin. “Whether Winds or the first volume of Fire and Blood will be the first to hit the bookstores is hard to say at this juncture, but I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018… and who knows, maybe two. A boy can dream…”
“I’ve seen some truly weird reports about WOW on the internet of late, by ‘journalists’ who make their stories up out of whole cloth,” he continued. “I don’t know which story is more absurd, the one that says the book is finished and I’ve been sitting on it for some nefarious reason, or the one that says I have no pages. Both ‘reports’ are equally false and equally moronic.”
The sixth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, Martin has been working on The Winds of Winter since around 2010. Fire and Blood meanwhile is a two-volume history of the Targaryen dynasty from Ageon’s Conquest through to Robert’s Rebellion.