The second season of House of the Dragon was a bit anticlimactic. Sure, season three will bring all-out war and the bloody battles fans have been waiting for, but that’s kind of a long time from now.
And while George R. R. Martin rarely talks in-depth about the TV adaptions of his novels, he would much rather talk about anything other than him finishing Winds of Winter, which he has been working on for over a decade. He has to get his priorities in line, so he decided not to address that at all. He does, however, have some words for House of the Dragon, we just don’t know what they are yet.
Martin took to his diary/blog, Not A Blog, to celebrate The Burning of Zozobra, an annual festival in New Mexico. He mentioned that he had a difficult year and recently got over Covid, so all he wanted to do was talk about his fun tradition. But he knew that everyone would be badgering him about other stuff. So he decided to address the elephant in the room. Well, one of them, anyway.
He wrote: “I do not look forward to other posts I need to write, about everything that’s gone wrong with HOUSE OF THE DRAGON… but I need to do that too, and I will. Not today, though. TODAY is Zozobra’s day, when we turn away from gloom.” Note how he is shifting our attention away from Winds of Winter, probably hoping we will all one day forget about it.
It’s unclear how Martin feels overall about House of the Dragon. He has expressed admiration for the show in the past, and even raved about the beginning of season two earlier this year, so who knows that he thinks now. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem great. At least he has something to distract him from writing, though!
As for Winds of Winter, in 2022, Martin claimed that the book was “three-quarters of the way done”, and stated, “It’s a challenging book. It’s probably going to be a larger book than any of the previous volumes in the series.” We can expect an update on that in the next five to ten years.