He wrote quite a lot about the difficulty of solving a series of events in Meereen in the lead up to A Dance With Dragons, which he referred to as "The Meereenese Knot".

Looking at this analysis on Reddit, GRRM mentioned this particular piece of trouble multiple times over a 5-6 year period ( https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2pp2m8/spoilers_all... ).

The crazy thing is that, based on what we saw in the series, much of the Meereen plot _doesn't even figure into the endgame_. I'm sure George has bigger plans, but Daenerys in Meereen seems to be at best the run-up to where her plot ultimately leads in the books, and yet George is spending years and years adding dozens of characters and solving a knot of plotting that seems like a sideshow! How he'll ever get to the point in his remaining lifespan is beyond me. The man is 74. Even giving him an extremely generous 20 more years of life, he's just not on pace to finish the series unless something changes very, very soon.

Meanwhile he's writing back story for Elden Ring, working on a series of TV shows, writing lore books and prequels to ASOIAF. Sadly the dude just seems to have lost the steam required to take it to the finish line.

It's extremely sad as ASOIAF is legitimately great.

I think he legitimately gave up on finishing the series a long time ago. Painted himself into a literary corner and rather then rely on some deus ex machina to sweep away the problems is choosing to never finish.

I guess the real lesson: unless their name is Brandon Sanderson, do not start a partially completed series.

> Even giving him an extremely generous 20 more years of life, he's just not on pace to finish the series unless something changes very, very soon.

Is he even working on it anymore? It looks like he is spending his time on numerous unrelated projects these days.

He makes token mentions of progress every couple of months, but I would not be surprised to hear it's essentially been shelved. My entirely unsubstantiated guess is that he hasn't exactly given up on it yet but is finding more enjoyment in other projects. Just like any of our long-languishing side projects, he may sit down and churn it on for a while here and there, but he's not spending full days at a time on it, or at least not consistently.

ADWD released in 2011. Even at his glacial pace it's hard to understand how he could still be working on it if he was consistently dedicating hours a day to writing. It's not like he hasn't produced anything in that time either, so yeah, probably just not working on it much at all.