Hey, wait a minute!” some of you may be saying about now. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Where’s the Jaime and the Bortherhood without Banners? Where’s Stannis? We hardly saw Jon. That can’t be all of it.…”
Well, no. There’s more to come. Another book as big as this one.
I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I wrote lots about them. Pages and pages and pages. Chapters and more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that the book had become too big to publish in a single volume … and I wasn’t close to finished yet. To tell all of the story that I wanted to tell, I was going to have to cut the book in two.
The simplest way to do that would have been to take what I had, chop it in half around the middle, and end with “To Be Continued.” The more I thought about that, however, the more I felt that the readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters. So that’s the route I chose to take.
Jaime, Jon, Stannis and Theon, Davos Seaworth, and all the rest of the characters you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in The Long Winter, which will focus on events along the Trident, the Westerlands and the Wall just as the present book focused on King’s Landing, Mereen and Dorne.
—George R. R. Martin
June 2022