George R.R. Martin is a writer with writer’s block, which has been especially unfortunate since he’s the author of A Song of Fire and Ice. He’s been open about it, too. Earlier this week, the author admitted that he’s been “struggling” with The Winds of Winter, his sixth in the series and first in since 2011’s A Dance with Dragons. According to a new Wall Street Journal profile, Martin is finally taking his malady super-super-super-seriously: He’s gone into “hiding,” holing up in a “remote mountain hideaway whose location he refuses to disclose.” You’re welcome.
It’s not that Martin has been entirely slacking, though he’s admittedly done a bit of that. He’s been hard at work on other, non-Winds of Winter matters, including a new book, Fire & Blood, that’s a prequel covering the history of the Targaryen family. He’s also still working with HBO on the Game of Thrones prequel shows, which will keep the channel flush with GoT content once the main show ends next year.
But The Winds of Winter has turned into a real pickle — an ambitious monster that he says is “not so much a novel as a dozen novels, each with a different protagonist, each having a different cast of supporting players, antagonists, allies and lovers around them, and all of these weaving together against the march of time in an extremely complex fashion. So it’s very, very challenging.”
But he’s really hunkering down now, and that fact should chill his legions of impatient fans. After all, he’s said that he finished A Dance with Dragons by disappearing “in a bunker,” so this may simply be business as usual.
(Via The Wall Street Journal)