Free George R. R. Martin from The Winds of Winter

polygon.com:

At this point in my career, I’ve written many thousands of words and edited quite a few different writers. I know a lot about procrastination. That is why, without speaking to the man or knowing him personally at all, I am nonetheless prepared to make the case that George R. R. Martin simply does not want to finish writing The Winds of Winter.

He’s just not into it. If he continues to force himself to do it, the end result will probably be a pretty terrible book — and I think he knows that, and that’s why he can’t finish it, because he doesn’t want to publish a bad book. The alternative? We don’t get the book at all. And for me, that’s actually preferable.

I could be misreading the signs, of course. Like so many other unhinged fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, I’m basing this purely on vibes, and Martin does love to troll all of us by posting oblique productivity quotes and tagging them with the word “writing,” suggesting that he’s quite merrily chugging along on The Winds of Winter. I also realize that by writing this post, I may be invoking the wrath of fate itself in such a way that Martin will post on his blog tomorrow that The Winds of Winter is officially done and now in his editors’ hands. That would be great, actually! But I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

I realize this is a controversial opinion amongst fellow A Song of Ice and Fire fans. I read the original books all in a whack long before the TV show was even announced, and I waited along with everyone else for A Dance with Dragons, which was a day-one purchase for me. I’m one of those people who has always strongly preferred the books to the HBO series, which was one reason why I actually fell off watching, instead content to wait for the book series to conclude the story instead. Given all of that, you’d think I’d be one of the fans begging GRRM to finish The Winds of Winter already, lest I never get closure on the long-running story. Instead, I feel the complete opposite.

Part of my change in opinion