If George R. R. Martin writes a new book and it is out before the new TV season

I'm actually confident that TWOW will be out before Season 6 but yes, as everyone else has says, it and the series will have dramatically different stories from here on.

ixoy wrote: »

Are you? I've a bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell you.

Apparently 100 (manuscript) pages were bumped at a late staged in the editing of ADWD to TWOW which is projected to be over 1500 pages. Given the late stage they were moved, these should have been in something close to their final format so conservatively when he finished ADWD in May 2011, he had a decent chunk of TWOW already written.

We know he took a break from writing ASOIAF before starting TWOW in approximately January 2012 (which he's since says he regrets as he was "on a roll" at the time he finished ADWD).

At the Season 3 trailer in April 2013 he was saying he was about a quarter of the way done.

He's said that he doesn't expect this book to take as long as the past two as, AFFC was virtually written twice due to the decision to eliminate the 5 year jump forward. The remaining repercussions of this, chiefly the plotting of getting characters to where they're supposed to be for their arcs to begin to converge was finished with in ADWD (the infamous Meerenese Knot).

His initial estimate was that he could finish TWOW in about 3 years but he acknowledged himself that it was an optimistic target. On that estimate TWOW is already late (i.e. we should have seen it January 2015).

I think that may be why he's cancelling cons, interviews etc. to knuckle down to write, he as good as says so in this recent article where he says he's still hopeful he can get it out before Season 6.

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/03/george-rr-martin-winds-date

Given his publishers statements that it's not in their schedule for 2015, it would seem like the best we could hope for would early 2016. Then again, they're under orders not to schedule the release until they have his final manuscript and ADWD went from his initial anouncement that he'd finished in the 27th of April 2011 to final draft approval by May 19th and hit bookshelves less than 3 months later on July 12th so were he to hand over a final manuscript in the next few months, it could be out by Christmas.

That seems unlikely given his blog post cancelling his appearance at the San Diego Comicon this month and World Fantasy Convention in November of this year. He does mention in the post-script that, should he have TWOW delivered by the time either of these come around that he reserved the right to change his mind which would signify, to me at least, that completing TWOW by November wasn't outside the realms of possibility.

All things considered, I think we're going to get an announcement that the book is finished around Christmas which would just about give them the time to release the novel before Season 6 started. That would mean a writing time of about 4 years which isn't actually too bad when you think about it. TWOW was predicted to be around the same length as ADWD (which had a wordcount of 442k) and, if you contrast that to the 3 years it took JK Rowling to write Order of the Phoenix (a wordcount of 257k).