All of us have vowed to be productive during the quarantine.
How many times have you or a friend reeled off a list of things you’ll definitely achieve (and definitely not watch Netflix instead) during a lockdown?
Whether it’s learning a language, getting better at baking or writing a screenplay, we all have ambitions that we claim we’d tackle if we ever got the chance. Well, now that chance is staring right back at us.
And, George RR Martin—our wise, old creator of the books that birthed the gargantuan HBO hit, Game Of Thrones—is taking that chance and running with it. He’s using this unprecedented lockdown period to finish off the long-awaited next installment in the Game Of Thrones books. He says he’s writing every day and finishing off “The Winds Of Winter” in an isolated location.
He broke the news on his Not A Blog site, in which he also took the opportunity to share some of his thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I am off by myself in a remote isolated location, attended by one of my staff, and I’m not going into town or seeing anyone,” he wrote. “Truth be told, I am spending more time in Westeros than in the real world, writing every day. Things are pretty grim in the Seven Kingdoms… but maybe not as grim as they may become here.”
“The Winds Of Winter” will be the sixth in the series “A Song Of Fire And Ice”, which Game Of Thrones is based on. The TV series overtook the books after season six, and the series finale was criticised for the way it ended. Many have wondered how the series would have fared with George RR Martin’s books remaining the basis.
In a 2019 blog, he even wrote that if the novel wasn’t finished by August 2020, “you have here my formal written permission to imprison me in a small cabin on White Island, overlooking that lake of sulfuric acid, until I’m done.”
Did he know something we didn’t?