Someday I need to have a good rant against readers who demand certain publishing dates from authors. Recently Alastair Reynolds has been badly slated for agreeing a book a year deal, with people on the internet claiming he is sacrificing quality for a lucrative deal.
I've never seen anyone criticse Reynolds for the deal. Reynolds was writing roughly a novel a year before the deal, so the new deal doesn't really change anything.
Then, it was four years for AFFC. Then, it was almost 7 bloody years for ADWD.
5 years and 2 months for AFFC and then 5 years and 8 months for ADWD. Not even 6 and certainly not 7.
GRRM took the better part of 7 years to write one book of 1100 pages or so. That works out to about 157 pages a year. Hardly a blistering pace, and most of the book was written in late 2009, 2010, and early 2011, according to his blog posts. I know he had to start over in 2005/6, but I finished reading AFFC in 2004. I got ADWD on June 12, 2012. I am content with the results of the wait, however, but it took longer than it should have.
This is somewhat inaccurate. In the 2009-11 period, GRRM was reporting his completed page counts as he finished off the final version of each chapter, but that was only 'finished' material. In some cases those were chapters he'd been writing and revising for years without ever counting as 'finished'. He was still writing ADWD full-tilt in 2005-09 as well, but he was not having much luck finalising material.
Also, GRRM is a noted perfectionist who writes and re-writes material, junks stuff (in one case during the writing of AFFC, more than 200 pages' worth of material was completely thrown out) and starts again if he does not feel it is working. To get the 1,530 manuscript pages that make up ADWD, GRRM actually wrote a lot more than that (I've seen estimates ranging from twice to almost three times that actual page count).
GRRM's writing methodology - partially a result of his refusal to use outlines - may be inefficient, but it's also hardly the result of a lack of writing discipline.
I think the tv show will definitely put pressure on GRRM to publish the next couple books but at the same time he is one of the writers on the show, or at least he was in the first season and I'm pretty sure the second, and that itself is very time consuming. The positive side to that is that he knows what can be cut and what has to stay in order for everything to work out in the end.
GRRM writes one script per season, which takes about 1 week per script. He also helps out a bit with the casting, which takes another couple of weeks per year. Overall, GRRM's time contribution to the TV show is fairly limited.
GRRM writes one episode per seasn. he did "Baelor" in the first season, and "Blackwater" in the second. He will be doing one episode in the third season, unless his contract has been changed.
Yes, he's written the seventh episode of Season 3, with the title "Chains".
The problem is when you take months at a time off because you are going to every convention under the sun.
There is very much a perception problem here. GRRM gets invited to several hundred conventions/appearances worldwide per year. This year he's actually appearing at a grand total of seven. Not a vast amount.
The problem is that GRRM isn't the least bit worried about it getting finished and doesn't really seem interested in finishing it anytime soon.
This is very definitely not true. GRRM is extremely keen to get
ASoIaF finished, as he has a very long list of additional novels and short stories he wants to write once it's done. The problem, as I mentioned earlier, is that GRRM doesn't want to change his writing methodology. If he wrote on a modern word processor rather than a 30-year-old DOS thing, he'd probably save a lot of time. If he outlined, he'd save a lot of time. But he doesn't work that way and sees no reason to change (as it's served him quite well so far!).
Though I doubt very much that GRRM would let us know the fate of either Jon or Jaime by revealing a POV before that volume is published. The man, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, with the highest respect a fan can extend to an artist, is a sadist. 
