George R.R. Martin confirmed on the second day of 2016 that he has still not finished The Winds of Winter and it will not be published before HBO begins airing season six of Game of Thrones in April.

In a post on his Not A Blog site, Martin admitted that he hoped to have the sixth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series out before Thrones’ sixth season. However, that isn’t going to happen. Martin wrote:

“THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished.

“Believe me, it gave me no pleasure to type those words. You're disappointed, and you're not alone. My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed... but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me. For months now I have wanted nothing so much as to be able to say, ‘I have completed and delivered THE WINDS OF WINTER’ on or before the last day of 2015.

“But the book’s not done.”

Martin said that he has written “hundreds of pages” already. He met with his publishers, who believed that in order for the book to be published by the end of March, he would have had to have the completed manuscript done by October. He thought he could do that in May, but as the year went on, it became clear that he couldn’t.

“Unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked. You can blame my travels or my blog posts or the distractions of other projects and the Cocteau and whatever, but maybe all that had an impact... you can blame my age, and maybe that had an impact too...but if truth be told, sometimes the writing goes well and sometimes it doesn't, and that was true for me even when I was in my 20s. And as spring turned to summer, I was having more bad days than good ones. Around about August, I had to face facts: I was not going to be done by Halloween. I cannot tell you how deeply that realization depressed me.”

Martin took all the blame for not being able to get it done on time.

This all puts Thrones in a really strange situation. As Martin noted, source material for TV shows are usually completed before a show starts, but that’s not the case here. The new season, which begins in April will be bringing to life a book that hasn’t even been finished yet.

The author did post a draft of a chapter back in April. He is not going to write any episodes of Thrones’ sixth season so he can concentrate on getting The Winds of Winter done.