George R.R. Martin Releases Chapter from THE WINDS OF WINTER

George R.R. Martin has released another chapter from his upcoming release, THE WINDS OF WINTER. It reads, in part:

She woke with a gasp, not knowing who she was, or where.

The smell of blood was heavy in her nostrils... or was that her nightmare, lingering? She had dreamed of wolves again, of running through some dark pine forest with a great pack at her hells, hard on the scent of prey.

Half-light filled the room, grey and gloomy. Shivering, she sat up in bed and ran a hand across her scalp. Stubble bristled against her palm. I need to shave before Izembaro sees. Mercy, I'm Mercy, and tonight I'll be raped and murdered. Her true name was Mercedene, but Mercy was all anyone ever called her...

Except in dreams. She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what she'd dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran.

She had fastened the shutters back so the morning sun might wake her. But there was no sun outside the window of Mercy's little room, only a wall of shifting grey fog. The air had grown chilly... and a good thing, else she might have slept all day. It would be just like Mercy to sleep through her own rape.

To read the full excerpt, visit: http://www.georgerrmartin.com/excerpt-from-the-winds-of-winter/

The Winds of Winter is the forthcoming sixth novel in the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin.

The previous installment, A Dance with Dragons, covered less story than Martin intended, omitting at least one planned large battle sequence and leaving several character threads ending in cliffhangers. Martin intends to resolve these cliffhangers "very early" inThe Winds of Winter, saying "I'm going to open with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle at Meereen-the battle of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there."

A Victarion chapter will begin five minutes after the end of A Dance with Dragons, taking place on the eve of the Iron Islanders' surprise attack on the cities in Slaver's Bay. An Arianne sample chapter that Martin released on his website shows her heading for Griffin's Roost to see the young boy who is calling himself Aegon.

Martin said in March 2012 that the final two novels will take readers farther north than any of the previous books,and that the Others will appear in the book.

The Winds of Winter was originally intended, in the very early stages of the series, to be the final installment of A Song of Ice and Fire (then conceived as a trilogy).Following his expansion of the series, Martin eventually concluded it would be succeeded by one final novel, A Dream of Spring.By June 2010, Martin had finished four chapters for The Winds of Winter from the viewpoints of Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, and Arianne Martell.In July 2010, he added an Aeron Greyjoy chapter that had been moved from A Dance with Dragons to The Winds of Winter, accumulating around 100 completed manuscript pages. Following the publication of A Dance with Dragons in the summer of 2011, Martin announced his return to writing the series in January 2012,having spent the intervening time on his U.S. and overseas book publicity tours and attending various conventions. He continued to work, with his two co-authors Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson on the planned illustrated series companion guide The World of Ice and Fire concordance andWesteros history, which at one time he wanted to have completed by the end of 2011. He also worked on a Westeros story, the fourth Tales of Dunk and Egg novella, (working title: "The She-Wolves of Winterfell") that will eventually find anthology publication elsewhere. A year after that eventual publication, the story and the three previously published Dunk and Egg tales will be collected and published in the U. S. by Bantam Spectra as a stand-alone fix-up novel.

In December 2011 Martin posted a Theon Greyjoy viewpoint chapter from The Winds of Winter; he also announced that another sample chapter would be included at the end of the North-American paperback version of A Dance with Dragons,released on October 29, 2013.(International paperback editions of A Dance with Dragons published a year earlier did not include a new, as yet unpublished sample chapter.) In the first quarter of 2012, Martin read new chapters of other characters at public events, including the chapters of Victarion Greyjoy and Tyrion Lannister.Martin continued work editing anthologies and completing a large, highly-detailed series atlas The Lands of Ice and Fire, which was published in October 2012.Martin published another sample chapter from Arianne Martell's POV on his website in January 2013.

Martin believes the two last volumes of the series will be big books of 1500+ manuscript pages each. By October 2012, 400 pages of the sixth novel had been written, although Martin considers only the first 200 as "really finished", the rest still needing revisions.Martin hopes to finish The Winds of Winter much faster than his troublesome fifth Ice and Fire novel.In the past, Martin has angered some of his fan base for repeatedly estimating his publication dates too optimistically; therefore, he has refrained from making hard estimates for The Winds of Winter's final release date. A realistic estimate for him for completing the sixth novel might be expected at three years, at a good writing pace, but ultimately the book "will be done when it's done". Martin has acknowledged his concerns about the final novel not being completed by the time the HBO series Game of Thrones finally catches up in its story line to the novels. He does not intend to separate characters by geography again, as he was forced to do because of the unpublishable length of A Feast for Crows' original manuscript. But, as Martin stated in a 2011 interview, "Three years from now when I'm sitting on 1,800 pages of manuscript with no end in sight, who the hell knows".

In January 2014, Martin's UK publisher, Jane Johnson, declared on Twitter that the book would "certainly" not be published before 2015.