Martin believes the two last volumes of the series will be big books of 1500 manuscript pages each.
[43] The sixth book will be called
The Winds of Winter,
[44] taking the title of the last book of the originally planned trilogy.
[34] By the middle of 2010, Martin had already finished five chapters of
The Winds of Winter from the viewpoints of
Sansa Stark,
Arya Stark,
Arianne Martell, and
Aeron Damphair, accumulating to around 100 completed pages.
[44][45] The Winds of Winter will resolve the
Dance with Dragons cliffhangers early on and "will open with the two big battles that [the fifth book] was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle [...] of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there."
[46] After the publication of
A Dance with Dragons, Martin announced he would return to writing in January 2012.
[13] He spent the meantime on book tours, conventions, and continued working on his as-yet-unpublished
The World of Ice and Fire companion guide and a new
Tales of Dunk and Egg novella.
[47][48]
In December 2011, Martin posted a chapter from
The Winds of Winter from the viewpoint of
Theon Greyjoy at his website and promised to include another sample chapter in the paperback version of
A Dance with Dragons.
[49] International paperbacks had no new sample chapter,
[50] whereas the North-American paperback version, originally expected to be released in summer 2012,
[46] has been pushed back to October 29, 2013.
[51] Four hundred pages of the sixth novel have been written as of October 2012, although Martin considers only 200 as "really finished"; the rest needs revising.
[23] Martin published another sample chapter from Arianne Martell's POV on his website in January 2013.
[52] Martin hopes to finish
The Winds of Winter much faster than the fifth book.
[39] He gave three years as a realistic estimate for finishing the sixth book at a good pace,
[1] but said ultimately the book "will be done when it's done",
[34] acknowledging that his publication estimates had been too optimistic in the past.
[13] Martin does not intend to separate the characters geographically again but said that "Three years from [2011] when I'm sitting on 1,800 pages of manuscript with no end in sight, who the hell knows".
[17]
[DOUBLEPOST=1366837228][/DOUBLEPOST]The first couple seasons of GoT are paced kind of quickly and can be a little confusing for people without at least a bit of the hundreds of pages of backstory in the books, so I recommened books first for improved TV watching.
