It’s been 12 years since George RR Martin published A Dance with Dragons, the latest book in his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. Since then, HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation of the novels has been and gone; relying on the 74-year-old’s outline of his final two books The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring for the last few seasons. The author has been letting ASOIAF fans know for the past few years that he’s hard at work on the penultimate novel, stressing it will be a very big book. However, in a new blog post on the upcoming Dunk and Egg show (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight), he confessed to signing up for more projects and even teased an edit to his writing schedule which spells bad news for fans who have already been waiting years.
Martin, who will be an Executive Producer on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, has written three Dunk and Egg novellas to date which can be adapted for the show but realises he needs to find the time to pen the others. There are around six more in the pipeline.
He wrote on his blog: “If THE HEDGE KNIGHT turns out as well as we hope it will, our hope would be to go on and adapt THE SWORN SWORD and THE MYSTERY KNIGHT as well. That will take a few years. Then comes the hard part. Before we reach the end of the published stories, I will need to find time to write all the other Dunk & Egg novellas that I have planned.
“There are… gulp… more of them than I had once thought. There’s The Village Hero and the Winterfell story, the one with the She-Wolves, and maybe I need to write that Dornish adventure too to slip in between The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword, and after that there are… ah… more.” The author then came onto his writing schedule, which sounds much looser than previously stated.
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A few years ago, Martin shared that his writing schedule was to finish The Winds of Winter and then have a palate cleanser with a fourth Dunk and Egg story, before tackling the ASOIAF finale A Dream of Spring. After that, he planned on a fifth Dunk and Egg, followed by Fire and Blood Volume 2. The latter is the second half of the 300 year history of the Targaryen dynasty. The first half, published in 2018, included the civil war which is the subject of the HBO show House of the Dragon.
Yet in his latest post, the author wrote: “I just need to finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, and then do either A DREAM OF SPRING or volume two of FIRE & BLOOD, and slip in a new Dunk & Egg between each of those in my copious spare time… and that will keep me ahead of Ira and his merry crew… for a few more years.”
By the sounds of it, he’s open to writing Fire and Blood Volume 2 before finishing ASOIAF with A Dream of Spring. And if demand for more series of Dunk and Egg arises, we wouldn’t be surprised if those novellas become a priority of the last novel in the series too.
