Fans have been waiting to read The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, for well over a decade now. The last book in the series, A Dance With Dragons, came out in 2011, the same year that HBO started adapting Martin's books as Game of Thrones. The other month, Martin said that work on Winds is going "pretty well," but that he wishes it were going "faster." Understatement of the century.

Why is the book taking so long? Some fans pin it on Martin getting distracted by other things. For instance, last week, Martin revealed his involvement with Colossal Biosciences, a company that brought dire wolves, a huge species of wolves that's been extinct for thousands of years, back into the world. Direwolves are alive and well in Westeros, so there's a Martin connection there. The author traveled...