Don't worry, fans of _Game of Thrones_! This chart shows that George R. R. Martin will manage to keep up with the TV show. Unless he doesn't.

So many things to argue about:

The chart uses the average time between Song of Ice and Fire book releases to predict the times Martin will complete the remaining two books and compares this with the expected schedule of the show, which is supposed to run for eight seasons. (The third book was split into two seasons.) If Martin writes as fast as he normally does, he will have a little time to spare. It’ll be close, but he’ll make it.

This, of course, assumes Martin doesn’t take an exceptionally long time with the final two books—and he might. On Conan he described The Winds of Winter as a “fifteen-hundred page monster,” which would make it as long as A Dance With Dragons. If the last two take the six years that Martin took to release A Dance with Dragons, then expect the HBO show to go on hiatus or produce an ending based on hints from Martin. And who knows that there won’t ultimately be eight or more books? The series was originally supposed to be a trilogy.

Still, there are bigger problems to worry about—for example, hiatus or no hiatus, the teenage actors who play Arya, Bran, and Sansa are growing up much faster than their characters. Then again, maybe their characters will die in horrendous fashion before that becomes too noticeable.

My first three quibbles...

1. How can it take Martin less than 4 years to write the 1500-page Winds of Winter when it took him more than 6 years to write smaller tomes?

2. Why would they even SUGGEST that the young Starks die? Are they trying to cause me pain???

3. Why is book 3 worth two seasons but none of the other books are?

Sounds like Winds of Winter could be three seasons by itself if HBO let it.

From a girth-of-source-material point of view...

...we're not even a third of the way through the entire series yet once you add books 6 and 7!

Book 3 has the most action scenes of all the novels.  There is a lot of world development, history, dialogue, and internal dialogue that is just chopped from all the books thus far.  Big plots action scenes are harder to chop though, so Book 3 gets 20 hours.

Also, the average of all the books is the wrong metric.  He had the first three fairly quickly (that is when I got on board this train).  The gap from 3 to 4 was long.  4 to 5 was longer.  from wikipedia..

• A Game of Thrones (1996)
• A Clash of Kings (1998)
• A Storm of Swords (2000)
• A Feast for Crows (2005)
• A Dance with Dragons (2011)
• The Winds of Winter
• A Dream of Spring

Geez, that's an unsettling trend of timelines.

Looking at Game of Thrones season 4 spoilers...

http://pandawhale.com/post/21357/game-of-thrones-season-4-spoilers

...I can see that there's still plenty of material from A Storm of Swords for season 4.

Then again, if The Winds of Winter truly is 1500 pages, there may be enough for 2 seasons there too!