So I put Winds of Winter aside for a while, and I concentrated on finishing Fire and Blood. And they said, yeah, give us the new book that’s closer to being done instead of two more books ( The Winds of Winter and the purported final Song of Ice and Fire book A Dream of Spring). So I actually asked – we’re in the Random House offices here, and I’m about to get them in terrible trouble – but I asked them, do you want me to just ignore the new show that’s coming down the pike, or should I finish that book so you can get it out and then go back to. And from the novellas I’d written for my friend Gardner Dozois, Princess and the Queen and the Rogue Prince and so forth.” “And I already had the seeds of the book from material that was in The World of Ice and Fire. “When it became clear that we were going to do the Dance of the Dragons show, we wanted a book to go with that,” Martin told Durham. In fact, he stopped working on The Winds of Winter for a bit so he could focus on Fire & Blood, which allowed publisher Penguin Random House to publish the book well in time for the new series. Or was it the other way around? As it ends up, Martin already knew HBO was making a show about the Dance of the Dragons before Fire & Blood came out. Martin wrote Fire & Blood in part because he and his publisher “wanted a book to go along” with new Game of Thrones spinoff show That book went on to form the basis of House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show about the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. For instance, in 2018, while we were waiting for The Winds of Winter, he published Fire & Blood, a history of the Targaryen dynasty. So I kind of ripped them apart and rewrote them,” he said during the same discussion.īut he can also get sidetracked by other commitments. I was rereading some chapters that I’d written earlier, and I didn’t like them well enough. “I was working on it the day before I flew back here for three or four days. Why does Martin write so slowly? Part of it is that he’s a perfectionist who has no compunction about rewriting earlier stuff if it doesn’t live up to his expectations. During a discussion with writer David Anthony Durham last October, he said that he was “about 3/4 of the way done,” and that he expected it to be the longest book in the series yet. He’s been writing this thing for 12 years and counting at this point, and still has a ways to go. For proof, just look at The Winds of Winter, the long-in-coming sixth volume of his Song of Ice and Fire series.

Winter in the blood book