As 2024 dawns so do 13 years since George RR Martin published a book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Since A Dance with Dragons hit shelves in 2011, the Game of Thrones TV show has come and gone with the showrunners being forced to rely on the author’s plot outlines for his unwritten final two novels.

The HBO hit ended five years ago come May (yes you read that correctly) and despite positive updates on progress during the pandemic lockdowns, The Winds of Winter still doesn’t have a release date.

Even more painfully for ASOIAF fans, Martin’s New Year’s Eve blog post shared no update on the book, but plenty of information on other Game of Thrones side projects that are taking him away from writing the penultimate novel.

The 75-year-old’s latest blog post included news that some TV spin-offs will now be animated.

Martin, who was praising Netflix anime Blue Eye Samurai wrote on his blog: “As it happens, HBO and I have our own animated projects, set in the world of A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. None of them have been greenlit yet, but I think we are getting close to taking the next step with a couple of them. When this last round of development started a few years back, we had four ideas for animated shows, with some great talents attached. Writers rooms and summits, outline and scripts followed in due course… but, alas, two of the original projects were subsequently shelved.

“(Those of you who have read my reports in years past may recall that I prefer to say ‘shelved’ rather than ‘killed’, as nothing is ever dead for good in Hollywood, and a project put on the shelf one year can be taken off the shelf a few years later). (( I still have hopes of presenting the stories that we shelved in another form, perhaps as graphic novels)).

“Work on the other two animated projects continues apace, however…and meanwhile, we have moved NINE VOYAGES, our series about the legendary voyages of the Sea Snake, over from live action to animation. A move I support fully. Budgetary constraints would likely have made a live-action version prohibitively expensive, what with half the show taking place at sea, and the necessity of creating a different port every week, from Driftmark to Lys to the Basilisk Isles to Volantis to Qarth to… well, on and on and on. There’s a whole world out there. And we have a lot better chance of showing it all with animation. So we now have three animated projects underway.

“Will any of them make it to air? happen? No way to know. Nothing is certain in Hollywood. But if it does happen, with one or two or all three shows, I hope we can make them as good as gorgeous and gripping as BLUE EYE SAMURAI. We will for damn sure try.”

Fans on the ASOIAF Reddit page expressed their utter despair at the lack of Winds of Winter news amid further distractions for the author, who at 75 also has A Dream of Spring to write; something some fans doubt he’ll manage in his lifetime.

The most upvoted comment by one fan simply read: “GRRM just shoot me already please.”

Another wrote: “Didn’t even try to gloss over the progress on winds just hand me my meds all at once.”

One commented: “Soon it will be 13 years since he finished ADWD and a lot of people are still delusional enough to believe that TWOW is ever going to be finished because GRRM gave them some false hope while promoting HOTD.”

Another lamented: “It’s over. This project is dead. There’s no other way for me to look at it. I wish he’d be honest with himself, and then the fans, in that order. But announcing that he’s giving up on finishing the books would probably be the most excruciating thing he’s ever done, so I can’t blame him for dragging it out.”