The fifth season of HBO's the "Game of Thrones" has recently been concluded, and now fans who also read the "A Song of Ice and Fire" books where the show is based are itching to get their hands on "The Winds of Winter," the sixth novel.
This is what we know so far:
The fifth book--"A Dance with Dragons""--reportedly covered less story than Martin intended. He has removed a battle sequence that left a lot of cliff-hangers. He said that he will resolve this early in TWOW: "I'm going to open with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle at Meereen-the battle of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there."
On March 2014, Martin published one chapter on his website--"Mercy," where Arya trains with the Faceless Men--before season 4 aired on HBO. He said that it's an old chapter, but hasn't been published before.
"So it's new in that it is material that no one but my editors (well, and Parris, and David and Dan, and a few others) have ever seen before, but it's old in that it was written a long time ago, predating any of the samples that you have seen. The first draft was, at any rate. I've rewritten it a dozen times since then," Martin posted on his Livejournal blog.
The excerpt read: "She woke with a gasp, not knowing who she was, or where.
The smell of blood was heavy in her nostrils... or was that her nightmare, lingering? She had dreamed of wolves again, of running through some dark pine forest with a great pack at her hells, hard on the scent of prey."
Some analysts predict that the book will be released in 2016, while some think that it won't be out until 2017.
Martin's publisher is also uncertain about the release date of TWOW. Jane Johnson of HarperCollins told The Guardian: "Until George delivers, and I have no idea when that will be. This is such a huge series and so convoluted and hard to structure as he approaches the end that it is going to take time to get exactly right."
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