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  ====''The Winds of Winter'' ====
  ''The Winds of Winter'' will resolve the cliffhangers from ''A Dance with Dragons'' early on and "will open with the two big battles that the fifth book was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle ... of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there." By the middle of 2010, Martin had already finished five chapters of ''The Winds of Winter'' from the viewpoints of Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Arianne Martell, and Aeron Greyjoy, coming to around 100 completed pages. After the publication of ''A Dance with Dragons'' in 2011, Martin announced he would return to writing in January 2012. He spent the meantime on book tours, conventions, and continued working on his ''The World of Ice & Fire'' companion guide and a new ''Tales of Dunk and Egg'' novella. In December 2011, Martin posted a chapter from ''The Winds of Winter'' from the viewpoint of Theon Greyjoy; several other chapters have been made public since. Four hundred pages of the sixth novel had been written , although Martin considered only 200 as "really finished"; the rest needed revising. During the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico in early December 2016, Martin offered the following hint as to the tone of this book: "There are a lot of dark chapters right now ... I've been telling you for 20 years that winter was coming. Winter is the time when things die, and cold and ice and darkness fill the world, so this is not going to be the happy feel-good that people may be hoping for. Some of the characters are in very dark places." Martin did not intend to separate the characters geographically again.
  In 2011, Martin gave three years as a realistic estimate for finishing the sixth book at a good pace, but said ultimately the book "will be done when it's done", acknowledging that his publication estimates had been too optimistic in the past. In 2015 there were indications that the book would be published before the sixth season of the HBO show but in early January 2016 Martin confirmed that he had not met an end-of-year deadline that he had established with his publisher for release of the book before the sixth season. He also revealed there had been a previous deadline of October 2015 that he had considered achievable in May 2015, and that in September 2015 he had still considered the end-of-year deadline achievable. He further confirmed that some of the plot of the book might be revealed in the upcoming season of ''Game of Thrones''. In February 2016, Martin stated that he dropped all his editing projects except for ''Wild Cards'', and that he would not be writing any teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions or forewords before delivering ''The Winds of Winter''. In April 2018, Martin announced in a blog post that ''The Winds of Winter'' would not be published in 2018.