George R.R. Martin won’t let pressure rush his writing

SAN FRANCISCO – George R.R. Martin has been feeling the heat to finish The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth novel in his bestselling series, A Song of Ice and Fire, but he is not letting the pressure rush his writing.

“There is more pressure every year,” Martin said Monday in San Francisco at the U.S. premiere of the fifth season of Game of Thrones, the television series based on his books. “The main thing is to make the book as good as I can possibly make it.”

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Martin, 66, has completed five of seven planned novels: The most recent, A Dance With Dragons, came out in 2011, the same year the Emmy-winning television adaptation first aired. With this season, the series will have exhausted almost all the material from the existing books.

“Fifty years from now nobody is going to care how frequently the books came out,” he said.

“They will care if the books are as good as they can possibly be, if the books stand the test of time. That’s what I struggle with as I write.”

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