Season 5 of Game of Thrones is currently in production, with scenes just completed this week in Portstewart Strand, Northern Ireland. The fifth season will air on HBO in April 2015. Each season, creator George R.R. Martin has written one episode, but he won’t be involved at all in the current season because he’s too busy… writing Game of Thrones. Confused? The series is based on A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin’s best-selling series of fantasy novels. So far there have been five novels in the series. Martin is putting the finishing touches to the sixth, The Winds of Winter. “It usually takes me a month to write an episode of the show,” he said recently. “I decided I’d better skip this one and just concentrate on finishing the book.”
The TV series is quickly catching up with the books: the fifth season is based on the most recent book, A Dance of Dragons. Martin originally planned for there to be seven volumes in all, but has hinted that there may be an eighth. He may want to hurry up and finish. Some fans have expressed concern that the overweight sixty-five year-old author will die before finishing the epic fantasy series. Martin had a curt response to that idea.
