George RR Martin expresses ‘fury and despair’ when providing update on new Game of Thrones book

‘I would have liked to turn out a lot more,’ said the author

Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin has made progress on his long-awaited novel, The Winds of Winter – but it’s not all good news.

The 75-year-old recently lashed out at the prequel series House of the Dragon, saying that the HBO show “weakened” the overall story and that a lot had “gone wrong”.

Martin’s attention now appears to have returned to The Winds of Winter, scheduled to be the next book in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, which he began writing in 2010. A seventh and final book, A Dream of Spring, is set to follow afterwards.

In an update shared on Monday (9 September) to his Not a Blog page, Martin said that although he has produced “new pages” he has struggled to find “solace” in his writing.

He explained: “Writing came hard, and though I did produce some new pages on both The Winds of Winter (yes) and Blood & Fire (the sequel to Fire & Blood the second part of my Targaryen history), I would have liked to turn out a lot more.”

Martin added that he has become frustrated with two TV shows that he is working on. He wrote: “My various television projects ate up most of those months. Some of that was pleasant (Dark Winds, and The Hedge Knight), most of it was not.”

He continued: “The stress kept mounting, the news went from bad to worse to worst, my mood seemed to swing between fury and despair, and at night I tossed and turned when I should have been sleeping.”

Martin works as an executive producer on Dark Winds, a crime mystery series set among Navajo people. He is also involved in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, an adaptation of his 1998 novella The Hedge Knight, which is also set in the Game of Thrones universe.

The problem certainly doesn’t seem to be a lack of ideas, however, with Martin estimating that the final two books will be even longer than A Dance With Dragons and A Storm Of Swords, the longest books in the series so far.

In 2022, he called The Winds of Winter a “big, big book”, stating: “It’s a challenging book. It’s probably going to be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series.” Promisingly, he divulged that he was about “three-quarters of the way done”.

George R.R. Martin attends HBO's Game Of Thrones panel and Q&A during Comic-Con International 2014 (Getty Images)

For fans of the series, the lengthy wait for the official conclusion of the Game of Thrones saga can be an infuriating one. For Martin, however, there is no bigger challenge than finding the perfect way to say goodbye.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Independent in 2022, the author revealed he’d delayed finishing A Storm of Swords because he was struggling with saying farewell to so many of his beloved characters.

“I finished the entire book, except for the Red Wedding,” Martin recalled with a grimace. “That was such a painful chapter for me to write, losing some characters that I had come to know and love. Nine years I’d been with these characters, and now I was going to kill them horribly! That was difficult.”