The Winds of Winter

Viewpoint characters

George R. R. Martin has confirmed that the following characters have point-of-view chapters in The Winds of Winter:

George R. R. Martin confirmed that there are no new viewpoints intended for The Winds of Winter. Martin confirmed that Areo Hotah and Melisandre will return as viewpoints but did not state which novel their chapters will appear in, and that Bran Stark will appear in the novel, but did not elaborate if as a viewpoint. In addition, he teased at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con that Jeyne Westerling, Robb Stark's widow, will appear in the prologue chapter, but did not reveal who will be the POV character.

Chapters

The Winds of Winter was originally intended, in the very early stages of the series, to be the final installment of A Song of Ice and Fire (then conceived as a trilogy). Following his expansion of the series, Martin eventually concluded it would be succeeded by one final novel, A Dream of Spring. By June 2010, Martin had finished four chapters for The Winds of Winter from the viewpoints of Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, and Arianne Martell. In July 2010, he added an Aeron Greyjoy chapter that had been moved from A Dance with Dragons to The Winds of Winter, accumulating around 100 completed manuscript pages. Following the publication of A Dance with Dragons in the summer of 2011, Martin announced his return to writing the series in January 2012, having spent the intervening time on his U.S. and overseas book publicity tours and attending various conventions. He continued to work, with his two co-authors Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson, on the planned illustrated series companion guide The World of Ice & Fire concordance and Westeros history, which at one time he wanted to have completed by the end of 2011. He also worked on a Westeros story, the fourth Tales of Dunk and Egg novella, that will eventually find anthology publication elsewhere. A year after that eventual publication, the story and the three previously published Dunk and Egg tales will be collected and published in the U.S. by Bantam Spectra as a stand-alone fix-up novel.

In December 2011, Martin posted a Theon Greyjoy viewpoint chapter from The Winds of Winter; he also announced that another sample chapter would be included at the end of the North American paperback version of A Dance with Dragons, which was originally expected to be released in summer 2012, but was released on October 29, 2013. (International paperback editions of A Dance with Dragons published a year earlier did not include a new, as yet unpublished sample chapter.) In the first quarter of 2012, Martin read new chapters of other characters at public events, including the chapters of Victarion Greyjoy and Tyrion Lannister. Martin continued work editing anthologies and completing a large, highly detailed series atlas The Lands of Ice and Fire, which was published in October 2012. Martin published another sample chapter from Arianne Martell's POV on his website in January 2013. On March 27, ten days before the Game of Thrones season four premiere, Martin posted a chapter on his website, titled Mercy. Martin said the new chapter is actually an old one, though never published nor publicly read. In April 2015, Martin posted a Sansa Stark viewpoint chapter from The Winds of Winter titled Alayne. In May 2016, Martin replaced this chapter with an Arianne Martell chapter he had read from at Mysticon, and an Aeron Greyjoy chapter that was removed from A Dance with Dragons was read at Balticon.

As of June 2016, a total of 11 chapters from The Winds of Winter have been either read publicly or published as a sample chapter. The point of view characters with released material are Victarion, Aeron, Tyrion, Barristan, Arianne, Theon, Mercy (Arya), and Alayne (Sansa). Several websites, including Goodreads, have dedicated entire discussion panels to any material that has been released from The Winds of Winter, including plot twists, theories, and speculations.

At Guadalajara International Book Fair 2016, George R.R. Martin gave some clues about the dark nature of The Winds of Winter: ... "I’ve been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming. Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places. .... Things get worse before they get better, so things are getting worse for a lot of people.”

Publication date

Martin believes the last two volumes of the series will be big books of 1,500+ manuscript pages each. He does not intend to separate characters by geography again, as he was forced to do because of the unpublishable length of A Feast for Crows' original manuscript. But, as Martin stated in a 2011 interview, "Three years from now when I'm sitting on 1,800 pages of manuscript with no end in sight, who the hell knows". In April 2011, shortly before the publication of A Dance with Dragons which took him six years to write, Martin hoped that "the last two books will go a little quicker than this one has" and estimated that it would take "three years to finish the next one at a good pace". By October 2012, 400 pages of the sixth novel had been written, although Martin considered only the first 200 as "really finished", the rest still needing revisions. In April 2013, Martin estimated that he had a quarter of the book. In the past, Martin has angered some of his fan base for repeatedly estimating his publication dates too optimistically; therefore, he has refrained from making hard estimates for The Winds of Winter's final release date. Ultimately the book "will be done when it's done". In 2012, Martin had acknowledged his concerns about the final novel, A Dream of Spring, not being completed by the time Game of Thrones catches up in its story line to the novels.

In January 2014, Martin's UK publisher, Jane Johnson, declared on Twitter that the book would "certainly" not be published before 2015. In September 2014 Johnson stated that the book was "not a 2015 release", a statement she repeated in January 2015. In April 2015 Martin commented on his blog that The Winds of Winter will not be eligible for the 2016 Hugo Award which is awarded for science fiction or fantasy works of the previous year but he also said he would like to have it published before the sixth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones (which would cover material from the book) aired in 2016. In Autumn 2015, statements made by the Spanish editor and the Polish translator of the novel indicated that it was expected to be published in 2016.

In early January 2016, Martin confirmed on his Live Journal that he had not met an end-of-year deadline that he had established with his publisher for release of the book before the sixth season of the HBO show. He added that there was "a lot still left to write" and that completion of the book was "months away still... if the writing goes well". Martin also revealed there had been a previous deadline of October 2015 that he had considered achievable in May 2015, and that in September 2015 he had still considered the end-of-year deadline achievable. He further confirmed that some of the plot of the book might be revealed in the upcoming season of Game of Thrones but one of the showrunners, David Benioff, claimed that while certain key elements would be the same, the show would diverge from the book in many respects. In February 2016, Martin stated that he had dropped all his editing projects except for Wild Cards, and that he would not be writing any teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions or forewords before delivering The Winds of Winter.

In September 2014, Walt Hickey of FiveThirtyEight and Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post estimated the release date sometime between 2015 and 2018, based on extrapolation of Martin's writing pace.

On January 10, 2017, Martin announced on his blog in a response to a comment that he believed that The Winds of Winter will be released "this year", referring to 2017. However, he also noted that he believed the same thing would occur the previous year. In February 2017, he implied that he would announce completion and delivery of the book months before announcing its publication.