AGEING multimillionaire George R R Martin has stopped writing the next Game of Thrones book while in the middle of a sentence.

Halfway through The Winds of Winter, Martin typed ’Tyrion looked darkly at’ when he suddenly realised he was already very rich and quite old.

He said: “I was a hundred thousand words into this thing where I’ve got armies in one continent, zombies in another, dragons burning things all over the place and numerous uninteresting sub-plots involving minor noblemen whose names I cannot currently recall. It is, by anyone’s reckoning, a fucking nightmare.

“I was looking at several more months of inhumanly hard graft and even then everyone is bound to slag it off as ‘unsatisfying’.

“Meanwhile it is a lovely day outside and I am an older man with more money than I can possibly ever spend.

“You tell me why I should finish this? It’s an honest question. Someone else can do it if they like, I’m cool with that.”

Martin had already spent the morning wading through a massive Excel spreadsheet listing hundreds of characters as ‘ALIVE’, ‘DEAD’ or ‘IN SOME SORT OF SKY DUNGEON’, which he has since deleted.