Ever since George R.R. Martin published A Dance With Dragons in 2011, Game Of Thrones fans have been desperate for him to release his long-promised follow-up, The Winds Of Winter. After 14 long and agonizing years, some fans were starting to worry that the next installment in Martin’s legendary A Song Of Ice And Fire series would never arrive at all, and there’s been endless speculation about what has been causing the holdup. Now, at last, Martin has spoken out and provided an explanation for the protracted delay: George R.R. Martin has been trying to submit the manuscript for The Winds Of Winter for the past six years, but can’t get the PDF attached to the email to his publisher.
This finally explains everything! It’s disappointing that we need to keep waiting for The Winds Of Winter, but at least we know why it’s been taking so long for the new book to hit shelves.
“In 2019, I completed the final draft of The Winds Of Winter, the greatest book I’ve ever written, but sadly I have a weird thing with my email where every time I try to attach a PDF, the thing just gets all glitchy and stops loading,” Martin recently told a packed auditorium of 2000 fans during a fan convention in Glasgow, Scotland. “Bantam Books, my publisher only accepts submissions in PDF format. I keep begging them to let me just send them a Word document, in case that might be easier for me to attach, but they refuse to accept submissions in anything but a PDF.”
Absolutely devastating. This news is a terrible blow for fantasy fans everywhere. Still, any kind of explanation is better than the total radio silence we’ve been getting from Martin for the past 14 years!
Martin told the crowd that in the six years since he finished The Winds Of Winter, he has tried all sorts of tech fixes to get the PDF file to attach to his email, including switching browsers from Safari to Chrome, opening a new Gmail account, and deleting Tyrian Lannister from the draft entirely. Unfortunately, none of these troubleshooting attempts has solved the problem, and the draft of the long-awaited novel continues to languish on his desktop.
The author also claimed that he tried to print out the manuscript so that he could deliver it to his publisher in person, but his printer has been out of ink for 12 years and even when he replaces the ink cartridges, it still gives him an error message. Bantam Books has confirmed that even if Martin were able to get his printer working so he could print out The Winds Of Winter, they would not accept it because they only take PDF submissions.
This is so heartbreaking! It really seems like there are some serious tech issues that are keeping us from reading the next chapter in this beloved fantasy saga. While this definitely isn’t the news that Game Of Thrones fans wanted to hear, the one silver lining is that Martin says he is not giving up, and that he still spends about two hours every morning trying to attach The Winds Of Winter to an email so he can get into fans’ hands as soon as possible. Hopefully someone figures out what’s going on Martin’s email so we can finally get a chance to return to Westeros after all these years!
