Winter is coming thawing soon: HBO just revealed a few tantalizing details on the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel series.

“We are doing a pilot that Jane Goldman wrote,” HBO programming president Casey Bloys confirmed for reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Wednesday. With HBO exploring five different GoT spinoff concepts, “we’d be lucky to get one that we’re very, very excited about, and we did get that. We’re just starting the search for a director… we have to cast it. We hope to be shooting sometime in the new year.”

HBO ordered a pilot for the untitled prequel last month, with the action set thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones. Per the official logline, “the series chronicles the world’s descent from the golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour. And only one thing is for sure: from the horrifying secrets of Westeros’ history to the true origin of the white walkers, the mysteries of the East to the Starks of legend… it’s not the story we think we know.”

In addition to writing the pilot, Goldman (X-Men: First Class) will serve as showrunner, and will join Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin as an executive producer. You’ll have to wait a bit to see it, though: Bloys said earlier this year the prequel won’t debut until at least a year after the original GoT wraps up its final season — which won’t start until the first half of 2019.