Waiting for the winter that never comes: George R. R. Martin, the long delay, and the afterlife of Game of Thrones

It’s been nearly fifteen years since A Dance with Dragons was published. That was 2011, the same year Game of Thrones first aired on HBO, when Twitter was still young, and we had no inkling of the juggernaut the series would become. 

Back then, The Winds of Winter seemed just over the horizon. George R. R. Martin had already begun writing it. Some readers expected it within a few years. Many still believed that the books would finish before the show caught up.

That never happened. HBO's Game of Thrones finished almost six years ago, and Martin has now been working on The Winds of Winter for well over a decade. 

The death of genre? Why writers are dismantling old labels

It used to be so simple. You wrote a crime novel, or a romance, or a dystopia. Bookshop shelves were helpful about such things: spine out, genre in. Literary fiction sat in its elegant corner, cool, aloof, unbothered by the commercial hustle elsewhere. Genre fiction was the grafter, busy, popular, and a little bit suspect.

But something is shifting. Writers are slipping past those borders, and readers are following them. In fact, they’re relishing the trespass. Literary novels are embracing dragons and time travel. Crime writers are reaching for unreliable narrators and experimental prose. Romance authors are crafting love stories that refuse tidy arcs. In 2025, the lines feel not so much blurred as beside the point.

Genre-blending that defies labels: From Romantasy to experimental fiction

What do you call a novel that blends gothic romance, dark academia, political allegory, and a magic system based on linguistic theory? 

In 2025, the answer might be: a bestseller. Genre boundaries are increasingly porous, and today’s readers are embracing the hybrid. Welcome to the era of genre-blending fiction, where labels are looser, rules more elastic, and expectations deliciously disrupted.

From Memoir meltdown to dystopian excess: Jame Frey returns with a roar

Like a lot of people, I read A Million Little Pieces when it came out. I read it quickly, swept up by its manic rhythm and gut-punching candour. It felt raw, painful, and honest. 

Then came the controversy: the revelations that much of the book, which had been marketed as a memoir, had been fabricated, culminating in a televised public shaming by Oprah Winfrey in 2006. It wasn’t a memoir at all. More of a novel memoir mashup. A novior, if you like.

It was a moment that seemed to draw a line under Frey's literary future, banishing him to the margins of credibility. He was cancelled.