12 Years Ago Yesterday: Kong was slain/ADWD was finished

4/27/2011 Blogpost: 27 | April | 2011 | Not a Blog

Background

Meant to finish this yesterday but didn't. Its crazy that it has been 12 years since he finished ADWD and what a ride it has been since then. It feels like both yesterday and a million years ago (cursory "Egg, I dreamed that I was old"). So here is a somewhat disjointed post with some random musings/tangents and of course shameless self promotion.

If interested: GRRM's "Tentative" Schedule/Plan

Note: I am just giving a few examples of each, this isn't meant to be a comprehensive list of GRRM's notablogs nor my exhaustive, repetitive posts.

TWoW Completion Estimation by GRRM

• If things go well, he hoped to be done by 2014.
• No, actually, he's optimistic 2015 would be the year.
• Ah, no, it was going to be 2017.
• Hey maybe he can finish both TWOW and F&B in 2018.
• Not in 2019, but before WorldCon 2020.
• Hopefully by 2021

Thoughts on His Writing Progress/TWoW

There have been numerous changes to GRRM's original outline (especially with Jaime Lannister), as well as adding additional books, abandoning a 5 year gap, etc. all of which has caused the wait between books to growing increasingly since the turn of the century.

There are a lot of dark chapters right now in the book that I’m writing. It is called The Winds of Winter, and 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 fills the world, so this is not gonna be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters [are] in very dark places…In any story, the classic structure is, ‘Things get worse before they get better,’ so things are getting worse for a lot of people

TWoW is going to be an extremely dark book, in which plenty of our favorite characters are going to die/do things that we wouldn't want them to (this may be one thing that GRRM is struggling a bit with)

As you can see it is very easy to go back and forth between a sweet summer child and knight full of terror:

• GRRM's Writing Style: Some Possible Good News (2020)
• Four years ago today GRRM dismissed a comment about it taking four more years... (2021)
• GRRM's Recent Comments on TWOW's Length (2022)
• GRRM: "Back with Tyrion" in TWoW (June 2022)
• Why I'm Excited... GRRM's Recent NotABlog Comments (July 2022)
• GRRM's Recent TWOW Comments (May 2023)

That is not to say there hasn't been some great information given to us about different parts of the ASOIAF world ranging from information on Blackfyre (Sword) (June 2022), Casterly Rock (December 2022) as well as the new Dunk & Egg show. (April 2023).

The Book Itself

Not really sure if it belongs here, but here is a bit of what I think TWOW will look like:

• Prologue: Whitesmile Wat
• Our Last "Unconfirmed" POV for TWoW
• Reading "Death" in TWOW is going to be different
• Death of a POV: There is always another POV Character Around
• Thoughts on the "Four Major Battles" at the Beginning of TWOW

I hope you "enjoyed" this meandering post and heres to hoping we get Winds sometime in the next couple years.

Up Next (sometime in the next few days): The "Meereenese Knot" of The Winds of Winter.

TLDR: On April 27, 2011 (12 years ago yesterday), GRRM slew Kong (finished A Dance with Dragons). Son of Kong (The Winds of Winter) is proving to be a much harder write.