A Dance with Dragons nearing completion

Or at least that's the news that came out of the New York Comic Con.

Spectra senior editor Anne Groell, when inevitably asked about A Dance with Dragons, had this to say:

"We're hoping to have a finished manuscript by Christmas. He's told me he has five chapters left and bits of each chapter are done. He really wants it done by the end of the year. We really—I mean really—want to announce the pub date in January."

Given that much of the manuscript is said to have already been 'locked' (edited and ready to go, in other words) it seems that a publication date in 2011 is definitely a possibility. While it looked at one stage that the book would be even longer than A Storm of Swords (1530 manuscript pages), it seems likely to be shorter now as some chapters have been moved to The Winds of Winter instead.

It'll be interesting to see how the US and UK editions are published; to my knowledge, A Storm of Swords was released in one volume in the US and in two volumes in the UK (in paperback), so a repeat of this is certainly possible.

Another issue that remains murky but will become clearer with time, is whether the series will exceed seven books. GRRM has insisted that he doesn't want to exceed this number of books, but with chapters being shunted from A Dance with Dragons to The Winds of Winter, it's possible this will also happen with chapters being moved from The Winds of Winter to A Hope of Spring, which if course will eat up space in the final volume for fresh material. Only time will tell whether this will become a problem.

GRRM confirms page limit for ADWD

In a brief interview posted yesterday, GRRM has admitted he's rapidly approaching the maximum page-count for A Dance With Dragons:

“Practically speaking, there can’t be more than about 250 (pages)more...1550 is the limit. Any more and the binding won’t hold.”

Given that a few weeks back GRRM confirmed he was on page 1311, it appears that he's getting dangerously close to the limit.

This of course doesn't mean he's nearly finished the novel - it's not a case of "just another couple of hundred pages and it's done." If anything, this revelation creates more problems, and again hints that splitting the book in two might be necessary if GRRM goes over the limit. If for some reason the publisher is reluctant to do so (unlikely, since it would mean much more of a profit), then GRRM might end up having to go back over the novel and start removing scenes and chapters, which could be both problematic and time-consuming (and this might not even be possible, given that he's said before these pages are 'locked' and have been edited and finalised already). Ultimately, it all depends on whether he can wrap up the novel's story-arcs within the remaining amount of pages he has left. Whatever happens, fans are going to have plenty to get their teeth into when the novel is finally released.

And when that might be, GRRM naturally refused to divulge:

“I don’t do deadlines any more. I’ve been scarred too many times...Whenever I get close to a deadline, I can feel it bearing down on me. It doesn’t help. It actually hurts ..... and I wind up doing nothing.”

He also touches briefly on his fans-turned-detractors:

"I get these letters from the lunatics saying, ‘You better not pull a Jordan on us'...That really angers me on a bunch of levels. One, they’re speculating about my death and two, they’re diminishing Robert Jordan’s death, who was a friend of mine, like it was some sort of trick he did to get out of doing the book...It’s pretty nasty stuff.”