George R.R. Martin Breaks Six-Month Blog Silence to Talk Depression, Grief and Aging, Still No Word on The Winds of Winter
George R.R. Martin returned to his Not a Blog page this week for the first time under his own byline since February 19, and fans hoping the silence meant he was heads-down on The Winds of Winter got something else entirely.
“It’s been a while, I know,” Martin wrote. “My last blog post went up here on February 19. The posts that came after were made by my mighty minions. I am lucky enough to have a great staff of assistants… though even with their help, I kept falling further and further behind. This year has been… stressful, to say the least. So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming. Some great things, exciting things. Dreams coming true. But there have been nightmares too. I have lost friends. Battled sadness and depression. The worst may be yet to come. I turned seventy-seven last September, and I tell you, getting old is no fun. But there have been amazing times as well. I suppose that’s just life. Of course, I knew that. If you’ve read my stories, you know that.”
Nowhere in the post does Martin mention the sixth book in A Song of Ice and Fire. Readers have been waiting on The Winds of Winter since A Dance with Dragons closed out in 2011, and the excuses have piled up faster than the pages. In January 2024, Martin used his blog to blame “toxic fans” for making it harder to work, writing that people would “rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love” and “delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped.” By December of that year he was telling The Hollywood Reporter he was “13 years late” on the book and didn’t know how it happened “a day at a time,” a quote that reads less like a production update and more like a man bracing fans for the possibility it never comes.
The distractions have kept stacking up since. Martin spent time this year writing physics papers on superhero dynamics instead of Westeros. He opened a bar in Santa Fe called Milk of the Poppy in March 2025. And he signed on as a producer for A Dozen Tough Jobs, an animated Hercules movie that reimagines the Twelve Labors through the eyes of a Mississippi farmer in the 1920s. Every new side project makes the same argument in a different outfit: Martin has time to do almost anything except finish the one book his readers actually want.
The publisher, meanwhile, is happy to sell fans something to hold in the meantime. Random House confirmed the 2027 A Song of Ice and Fire calendar drops July 21, twelve new pieces of Westeros art from Tyler Jacobson and a fold-out poster included. Call it what it is: a wall calendar built to mark the days that Winds of Winter still hasn’t arrived.
Martin says he feels fine physically, aches and all, and insists the book is still coming. Fourteen years of blog posts like this one have trained readers to hear that promise differently. How many more “stressful years,” bars and producer credits does Martin get before fans stop waiting for The Winds of Winter and start planning for a Song of Ice and Fire that ends the way A Dance with Dragons did: unfinished?
Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.
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