George R.R. Martin down to his last 500 pages on Winds of Winter

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By now, fans of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books — the novels adapted into the HBO Max series Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon — are used to mildly exhausting updates on his progress on the 11-years-overdue next novel in the series, The Winds of Winter. An episode of the Comedy Central series Stephen Colbert’s Tooning Out The News has the latest from Martin, who says — sounding fairly sincere about it — that he’s written around 1,100 to 1,200 pages of the book so far, and just has “another 400, 500 pages” to go.

Martin has frequently expressed that he’s exasperated with fans and interviewers constantly nagging him about his slow progress on The Winds of Winter, which keeps getting sidelined as he works on other HBO shows and projects. But here, he seems to at least try to force a sense of humor about the whole thing, with some awkward laughs at the roasting. What he doesn’t address is why he doesn’t, as Patterson blithely suggests, separate Winds of Winter into releasable sections, given that a 1,700-page book isn’t really a physical possibility. “Problem solved!” Patterson says. “You break down the 1,100 pages into three books… You submit one book per year, they’ll be happy, and suddenly you’ll be ahead of schedule!” Martin just laughs.

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