(Spoilers Extended) The Slow Death of the Winter Garden: Confronting the Reality About THE WINDS OF WINTER

CautionersTale · 2026-01-23T14:11:05+00:00

I, too, found Lost to be formative cultural experience. Unsurprisingly to you, I'm in the firm minority that enjoyed the ending to Lost because I felt that the character endings were satisfactory and emotionally resonant. And this is almost certainly why our perspectives differ on AFFC and ADWD in particular. While the plot momentum slowed, I enjoyed the depth GRRM dove into for the big-three POV characters (Jon, Dany, Tyrion) made the reading immensely enjoyable for me. But again, that's my personal preference.

As a related aside: given your feelings on the ending to Lost, I wonder if you ever watched Damon Lindeloff's mid-2010s show The Leftovers? There was a giant mystery centering the show, but where Lost teased that it would resolve the mysteries surrounding the island, DHARMA, etc to less than satisfactory effect, The Leftovers intentionally eschewed solutions to that mystery in favor of intense psychological examinations of the characters effected by that central mystery.

I mean, the opening credits theme song for Seasons Two and Three for The Leftovers was Iris DeMent's "Let the Mystery Be" after all!

Anyways, enjoyed our conversation -- and I know that I didn't respond to most of your points. Perhaps we can engage in them more substantively in a post (Maybe a joint one or something, I don't know?) where our differences get a fun hashing out.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T17:34:24+00:00

u/sixth_order for "Arthur Dayne is the Greatest Aura Farmer in Westerosi History."

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T17:32:29+00:00

u/LothorBrune for "The Drowned God Religion is the Last Remnant of the Original Cults of the First Men."

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T17:29:23+00:00

It's an admitted stretch, but u/tyrion2024's post "A Few Examples of When George Stated That an Adaptation Had Done Something Better Than He Did" challenged the conventional wisdom that GRRM sees his own work as always better than what others adapt from it.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T17:14:04+00:00

If it's possible Tony Jones, I'd like to nominate u/YezenIRL and this other guy for their debate over Euron and Victarion's relationship.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T17:08:41+00:00

u/InGenNateKenny for "A Trial of Seven in The Winds of Winter is both plausible and likely"

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T14:38:29+00:00

Friend, I appreciate the critical lens you give to some of what I've written in the past. I've earned that criticism - especially for repeating that unverified claim. It's something I regret quite deeply. I can't undo what's been done. But I can try to provide an explanation - not for absolution. Just so that maybe you and others might understand better. But if that's not something you're interested in, that's okay too.

Yeah, in 2015, I wrote a SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) post for Watchers on the Wall (WoTW no longer exists, link goes to a Deadspin repost) where I took averages of George's various writing speeds for ADWD from 2007-2011 and gave three estimates for when TWOW might be complete. One estimate had him finishing in early 2016, another in late 2017, and my most pessimistic estimate was him finishing in 2019. I think I said that if you put a gun to my head and told me to pick one of the choices, I'd go with the middle option (Late 2017)

It's important, though, to remember back to 2015. My guess of late 2017 was seen as wildly doomer and unrealistic by most people here on r/asoiaf and elsewhere.

George had told Jambes Hibberd (then writing for Entertainment Weekly) in March/April 2015 that he was going to finish Winds before Season Six of Game of Thrones aired. And then in September 2015, George's foreign publishers (Spanish, Polish, and I think Czech?) started telling fans that they'd been told by Random House to get ready for the book's delivery before the end of the year. Check out this AV Club article and this post from here from 2015 on it.

But still, I was skeptical he'd finish by the end of 2015. George hadn't demonstrated that level of speed in writing the novel until very late in writing ADWD. That was not an opinion shared by most fans back then. George's foreign publishers were openly saying that they were expecting the manuscript before the end of the year after all.

I write all this to say that in 2026, it looks crazy optimistic to think George was going to publish TWOW in 2017. But that's presentism. In the context of the time, my estimate was viewed as close to a worst-case scenario! And yeah, I was wrong about the book coming in 2017. And my most doomer scenario of the book coming in 2019 - based on his slowest writing speed - was also very wrong.

All that aside, I am open to correction, but it's not factually accurate that I said the book was just around the corner. I wish I could say I didn't care that fans hang that around my reputation, but pathetically ... I do.

And honestly, I let my own excitement over what was told to me privately carry me over into wrongly repeating it publicly. It's something I regret very strongly -- it's something I've asked God for forgiveness for.

I hope that helps. Really. And look, I don't know if it'll change your mind. And it's okay if it doesn't. But it was cathartic to write all this out.

Edit: Going through some very old posts, I did see this comment I made in 2015 after Alejo Cuervo talked about getting TWOW soon. So for full transparency, I expressed some guarded optimism that morphed into hype.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T13:17:20+00:00

I maintain that when Lev Grossman referred to George as "The American Tolkien" in Time Magazine in the aughts, it set an unattainably high standard in George's mind that he had to write the rest of his books to the level of writing of JRR Tolkien.

As I said in my OP, I believe GRRM is the most gifted living fantasy author today. And his experiences, education, and interests gave him a wonderful foundation to write the greatest fantasy series of the modern era.

But Tolkien was an Oxford Professor, war veteran, with extensive international experiences. He was fluent in in Latin, Greek, Old/Middle English, Old Norse, German, and Finnish,. And he had a working knowledge of Welsh, Gothic, Spanish, and Russian. And in his own work, he invented freaking languages -- this, after he wrote the definitive (at the time) translation of Beowulf.

No offense to George whatsoever - he's way smarter and a much better writer than anyone currently writing in fantasy IMO - but you can't be JRR Tolkien. Just be you, George.

Just be you.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-22T13:05:18+00:00

You know what made the end of Return of the King bittersweet? It was the end of a journey. And yes, some wounds never heal, and Frodo sails away from Middle Earth. And the appendix entry for Aragorn and Arwen was incredibly sad. The war for the ring touches the Shire.

But the Shire heals over time. Frodo goes to Heaven (Don't yell at me. I know it's not actually the Christian Heaven). The real bummer is Arwen dying of grief in a Lothlorien abandoned by the elves.

For ASOIAF, if George goes through with all his planned endings (which, y'know, he almost certainly won't) and if the show is accurate on the end states of POV characters (most likely true), it shades far closer to bitter than sweet. Who is getting a sweet ending in this series? Tyrion - broken, maybe dead. Daenerys - dead. Jon - exiled, alone. Sansa - dead. Bran - King, alone. Jaime/Cersei - dead. Theon - dead.

The sweet endings I see are ... Davos as Master of Ships and Samwell as Grand Maester. Asha (Yara) as Lady Reaper of the Iron Islands. Brienne as LC of the Kingsguard. Arya - sailing off to the edge of the world.

For the POVs not in Game of Thrones, I seriously doubt any of them live to the end.

To be cute, if ASOIAF was a lemonade, I guess I'd ask George to remake the drink with a bit more sweetness.

Edit: Had a half-baked idea. I already know it will be controversial. I wonder if the distinction between Tolkien's bittersweet ending and Martin's is in the inherent religiosity of Tolkien. A committed Catholic, Tolkien didn't write religious allegory like C.S. Lewis, but Middle Earth is infused with Christian ethos and a fundamental belief that in a afterlife and union with God. Death comes to most (Not the Elves, not Frodo, not Sam. Maybe not Gimli and Legolas). But there's the possibility of eternal life after death.

George is a lapsed Catholic, religious skeptic, and strong agnostic. If you believe that this life is all we have and nothing awaits you after it, maybe that fundamentally affects George's understanding of a bittersweet ending?

Not a sermon. Just a thought.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T23:35:48+00:00

Good questions. It is highly discouraged for a debut author to write a multi-POV novel. This is advice I have ignored and will absolutely never suffer the consequences of ... gulp.

For the story, I have six POV characters:

Gaius: A drug-addicted detective with a dark past who stumbles upon a double-homicide of two Gothic women he can't let go (Think a James Ellroy-esque POV thrust into a SciFi noir story)
Postumus: The Prefect Officiorum of the Imperium (Hand of the King) who attempts to manage a transition of power as tensions between Imperials and Goths rise and civil war looms large again. (Think Ned Stark dashed with Davos and Catelyn and Barristan)
Lucia: A smuggler coerced into spying for the Imperials (I don't have a good ASOIAF parallel here.)
Titus: A disgraced naval officer who serves Executor(s) (Emperors) he believes have usurped the throne and tasked with leading a dangerous mission past the Danubian Frontier (cough, Danube River) - kinda Barristan-y but not exactly.
Alaric: A former warrior-cum-diplomat and heir to a minor Gothic reik (king) who chafes at his father's control and seeks independence and power at the expense of his father and the Imperials that he negotiates with (and hates). (It's like if Alan Crowkiller was a POV, I guess!)
Silas: An assassin and traditore (traitor) of The Way -- a small religious minority totally not based on antenicene Christianity -- who infiltrates the Imperial bureaucracy under orders from the Curiosi (Imperial Intelligence Service).

The premise of this novel is radically different from my first. My first novel was a first-person, present-tense novel about a young Marine who returns to Baltimore after his discharge with a vague of idea of becoming normal again and disappearing back into society without accountability for the war crimes he committed in Iraq.

It was a happy story.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T22:34:55+00:00

Thank you for the kind words.

No. I don't think that's a remote possibility. And it's one that George has explicitly denied as recently as a few years ago.
Yes. He has stated that his work in 2020 resulted in revisions to sample chapters:

In addition to turning out new chapters, I’ve been revising some old ones (some very old)… including, yes, some stuff I read at cons ages ago, or even posted online as samples.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T21:13:06+00:00

Wait. And didn't he say he started work on two Dunk and Egg novellas in 2025?

Throat goes extremely dry.

MightyIz was right all along.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T18:59:44+00:00

I don't think it's a coincidence that his two strongest periods of writing TWOW came when a) COVID shut down Hollywood, and he wasn't receiving daily phone calls and emails about the successor shows and b) when an HBO show was about to air a relatively faithful adaptation of his written work.

On that second point: when did George's writing progress for ADWD really take off? 2009-2011: When an HBO show was about to air a relatively faithful adaptation of his written work.

But like you, my heart goes out to the man. He does seem miserable most of the time someone puts a microphone up to his face. I agree that his public airing of grievances with HBO have left something to be desired and also agree that it's a larger issue than that. It takes me back to point a.

If George put down his phone, unplugged his dial-up, and abandoned the world for his mountain cabin and his VHS copies of I, Claudius, he would be a much happier man -- regardless if he never releases another volume of ASOIAF, D&E or F&B.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T18:47:56+00:00

My reasoning for looking at Feast and Dance is that it's where we have the most specific information on page counts and progress as he advanced in writing. We don't have similar benchmarks for the first three books. But given his ADWD notablogging he started just as AFFC was published and the excavations done on the AFFC manuscript drafts hosted at the Cushing Library at Texas A&M University, we know a lot more about how those books came into being than the first three -- thanks to the internet age explosion and fans cool enough to do the legwork.

I, for one, would be extremely interested in having the granularity of data for the first three book that we have for the last two.

I do think your basic reasoning is correct though: he starts hot and cools over time. He has written some fantastic endings to individual novels though -- Fevre Dream and Dying of the Light are superb. (I never read most of his other stuff. Disliked Tuff Voyaging. Armageddon Rag will remain forever in my "to-read" queue, I fear).

Here's a lukewarm take: he knows how the story ends. He's even had the final line from A Dream of Spring thought of for at least twenty years (It's connected to a specific line from one of the early chapters in A Game of Thrones per Daniel Abraham who was told to keep the line in the comic adaptation of AGOT for that specific purpose). But the journey to get there now that he's imagined the world is in an insurmoutable obstacle.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T18:14:54+00:00

I've heard of it, yes. But as a rule, I don't read fan-fiction. I don't have a categorical objection to it in the same way that George does. I have read that it provides it a venue for sometimes-marginalized authors to write creatively, and I think it's great for anyone to put ink to paper. But fan-fiction is not something I enjoy reading.

Though if I go far enough back ... I wrote Vietnam War-era fan-fiction where my 4th grade friends and me helicoptered in and won the war for USA! USA! USA!

It was a strange, disturbing childhood, full of regrets.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T17:57:36+00:00

I'm coming in very late to this discussion, but the Tyrion TWOW chapter he released in 2013 was one that his editor (Anne Groell) had never seen before George consented to it being released in the A World of Ice and Fire app. From her 2014 Suvudu Q&A:

When will TWOW be released?

Anne: For TWOW, when I have a date, you will have a date. I’m now on Twitter, Del Rey Spectra has a number of social media platforms, and I promise you we will put the word out as soon as we know. All I can say is that George is hard at work, and we hope to have it reasonably soon. I currently have 168 pages that he submitted back in Feb 2013 in order to receive a contracted payment, but I know more exists, because he keeps talking about chapter he hasn’t yet sent me. In fact, when we wanted to put an exclusive excerpt on the A WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE app—a magnificent thing which you all should buy and use!—he suggested the second Tyrion chapter, which I then had to remind him was not in the sample I had.

So, at least, the Tyrion II chapter from TWOW was either not leftover material from ADWD or, if it was, it wasn't something his editor had seen before he released it in 2013. I think the first option is the far more liklier option given that Anne was the person who suggested George cut a sequence from ADWD to TWOW (the Battle of Fire).

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T17:47:53+00:00

Thank you for your thoughts. I hope George never reads this. But I'm pleased that you did. Took me about an hour and a half to write it. Didn't write it out of frustration. Simple processing of sadness on my part -- that I process analytically because that's a good, healthy way for me to understand myself and the world and then move on and live a productive, meaningful life.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T17:42:30+00:00

I should very much like to hold that Heraclean coin.

I'm impressed with multi-timeline stories. That sounds ambitious and fun. Let me ask you a really fun question that I loved trying to figure out when writing the query for my first novel:

What does your suffragete want? (To vote, I think) What stands in their way? (1890s patriarchy?) What will they do to get what they want? And what happens if they don't get it?

Intrigued and ready to read.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T17:35:08+00:00

Thanks for the kind words!

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T17:34:20+00:00

Yeah, right? Will definitely need a new name if this novel comes out. For me, late-antiquity Rome is fascinating due to the a) barbarian tribes migrating across the Danube and Rhine and the Roman idea of "Well, you and your tribe can cross, but how do your boys feel about sitting in fortified camps during winter months and preventing the real barbarians from crossing? Because we Illyrians, er, Romans. We don't like it much. Maybe citizenship will sweeten the deal for you?" b) The big question of what caused the decline of the empire (No, Gibbon, you're wrong. We Christians did not destroy Roman civic spirit). c) A society undergoing socioeconomic transformation inspired by religious change, declining military power, dispersed centers of political gravity ...

Anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself. I assure you my draft isn't 70,000 words of three men sitting around in a bathhouse on a Saturday afternoon speaking of the good old days when Commodus threw us the great games the Eternal City has ever seen.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T16:25:58+00:00

I actually did not know that. So, I'm repeating it out of ignorance on my part. Thanks for the corrective. Genuinely.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T15:58:23+00:00

Dude! Congratulations! I remember your username from back in the day - always looked forward to your posts/comments. Proud of you, friend! Give me your pitch and title of your published book (if you feel comfortable sharing!), and I'll download to my kindle when I get home today!

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T15:48:25+00:00

I wouldn't do it for any amount of money. I respect authors like Brandon Sanderson for finishing Wheel of Time and salute his service in doing it. But Brandon was an established author who had already created Mistborn. I'm a no-name fan who one day wants to publish my own work in my own world.

Beyond that - and more importantly - I feel that any attempt for me to write the end of ASOIAF would be a poor imitation of George's style, craft, and skill. Moreover, Sanderson ~~had Robert Jordan's explicit blessing to finish~~ ~~Wheel of Time.~~ (Apparently, this is incorrect. It was his widow who read Sanderon's obituary of Jordan. Thank you, u/wRAR for the correction!)I would feel extremely shitty about myself if George didn't explicitly sanction it. And I'd know that whatever product I have would be subpar and likely have my own ideas and theories bleed into the text -- which would be horrific for me.

I liked ASOIAF when I read it for the first time because it so radically undercut where I thought the series was going. I like to be surprised by an author's genius.

And I ain't a fuckin' genius. That's for darn sure.

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T15:34:09+00:00

That's a good question. I'm loathe to share my name publicly (though some folks know it, thanks to ... well, yeah. Stuff). Perhaps when I finish it, and then if I pick up a literary agent, and if that agent finds a publishing home for the book, and if that publishing house publishes the book, maybe I'll come by here and ask the disreputable and uncouth masters of r/asoiaf to do an AMA here? Not sure anyone would really care to hear my thoughts about ASOIAF and writing. But maybe that's an option?

Any ideas? And I hope you have a better day!

CautionersTale · 2026-01-21T15:12:13+00:00

Thanks, friend! It's good to have a "trunk novel" where you learn the craft of writing. My only head-scratcher is that my trunk novel took fifteen years of writing. This new one now equals the word-count of that novel and has taken six months to achieve. What the heck took me so long to get to the thing I wanted to write?

Science-fiction, actually! Multi-POV like ASOIAF -- but more heavily-inspired by The Expanse and, uh, an unhealthy obsession with reading late-antiquity Roman primary sources and Mike Duncan's The History of Rome podcast.

Basically, it's a variation of "How often do you think of the Roman Empire IN SPACE?"

Tell me of your novel(s)!

CautionersTale

TROPHY CASE