Last week George R.R.Martin well full dracarys on House of the Dragon with a blistering, quickly deleted blog post. Now he’s returned to his “Not a Blog” with a much tamer, yet still somber entry. Martin’s latest entry includes a small update on The Winds of Winter. But just as the night is dark and full of terrors, he still throws some subtle shade at his problems with HBO and House of the Dragon.
In a post titled “A Belated Blog” Martin wrote about his busy schedule and travels during the summer. He also wrote about his continued struggles following the death of his close friend, Howard Waldrop, early this year. That is just one of the issues contributing to him feeling “stressful.” Unfortunately he says he has been unable to find “much solace” in work. Not that he hasn’t done any.
Martin said he was able to do some writing about Westeros. Only it was not nearly as much as he’d hoped. George R.R. Martin shared a bit abou his progress on Game of Thrones’ next book, The Winds of Winter, and Fire & Blood‘s sequel, Blood & Fire. He shares, “Writing came hard, and though I did produce some new pages on both THE WINDS OF WINTER (yes) and BLOOD & FIRE (the sequel to FIRE & BLOOD, the second part of my Targaryen history), I would have liked to turn out a lot more.”
“Some” is definitely better than “none.” But this small update from Martin leaves a lot to still be desired after The Winds of Winter‘s prolonged delay.
Martin said his TV obligations contributed to his less than ideal writing output. While Martin called some of those TV matters good, the bad seems to clearly means House of the Dragon. Here’s what he said about his TV work:
Some of that was pleasant (DARK WINDS, and THE HEDGE KNIGHT), most of it was not. The stress kept mounting, the news went from bad to worse to worst, my mood seemed to swing between fury and despair, and at night I tossed and turned when I should have been sleeping. When I did sleep, well, my dreams were none too pleasant either.
“Fury and despair” perfectly captures his already legendary post about his issues with House of the Dragon. The fact he specifically cited The Hedge Knight as a positive shows his issues are not with HBO at large. But unlike that “Not a Blog” post, this is a lot more subtle. No one will be able to ask him to take it down. This time he opted against direct conflict and instead chose to let us read between the lines.
Reading between lines is the best we can probably hope for these days. At least until “some” becomes “all” when it comes to Martin’s The Winds of Winter. But don’t stress about it, George. We know you have a lot on your mind.