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  ===Early development===
  ''A Dance with Dragons'' was originally intended to be the title of the second novel in the sequence, when Martin still envisioned the series as a trilogy. Some early US editions of ''A Game of Thrones'' (1996) list ''A Dance of Dragons'' as the forthcoming second volume in the series. The 1998 anthology ''Legends'', which features the novella ''The Hedge Knight'' from the same universe, listed ''A Dance of Dragons'' as the third installment of a four-book series.
  In May 2005 Martin announced that the "sheer size" of his still-unfinished manuscript for ''A Feast for Crows'' had led him and his publishers to split the narrative into two books. Rather than divide the text in half chronologically, Martin opted to instead split the material by character and location, resulting in "two novels taking place simultaneously" with different casts of characters. Published in 2005, ''A Feast for Crows'' is narrated primarily by characters in the South of the Seven Kingdoms and in the new locations of the Iron Islands and Dorne. ''A Dance with Dragons'' features characters in the North and across the narrow sea, although Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Arya Stark, Areo Hotah and Victarion and Asha Greyjoy appear in both volumes.
  Approximately one-third of the published ''A Dance with Dragons'' consists of material that had been written for the pre-split ''A Feast for Crows'', although much of this has been rewritten by Martin.
  In 2009, Martin confirmed that, contrary to earlier statements, Sansa Stark would not appear in ''A Dance with Dragons''; Sansa chapters initially slated for the novel have instead been pushed back to ''The Winds of Winter'', which is planned to be the sixth book in the series. In early 2010, Martin noted that his intent for ''A Dance with Dragons'' was for the first 800 manuscript pages to cover the alternate characters in the same time span as ''A Feast for Crows'', and that "Everything that follows is post-''Feast'', so that's where some of the cast from the last book start popping up again." Stating that "I wanted to resolve at least a few of the cliffhangers from ''Feast''," Martin also mentioned the possibility that some of his finished chapters might get pushed to the next novel, ''The Winds of Winter,'' depending on the length of the finished manuscript for ''A Dance with Dragons''.