George R.R. Martin has not made much progress with The Winds of Winter –

You take the time to make something the best it can be, and then it takes 12 years to write a book. George R.R. Martin has received a lot of criticism for the time he took to write The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in the Song of Ice and Fire saga.

In a recent episode of the Bangcast along with Bernard Cromwell, author of The Last Kingdom, Martin shares an update on how he is moving forward with the book. To put it bluntly, it doesn’t look good.

“I wish I could write as fast as [Bernard Cornwell], but I’m 12 years late with this damn novel and I’m struggling with it. I’ve written about 1,100 pages, but I have hundreds more to go. It’s a big mother of a book for some reason. Maybe I should have started writing smaller books when I started this, but it’s hard. That’s the main thing that dominates most of my working life.”

This may sound like a lot of pages, but in December 2022, Martin said he had done the same number of pages and still had hundreds to go. It’s not exactly a good sign, and given that there is one more book to go after The Winds of Winter, most have assumed they will never read the end of the story the way George R.R. Martin intended.