George RR Martin has informed fans impatient for his new Game of Thrones novel The Winds of Winter that he is “still months away” from completing it – but offered hope that they might be reading it next year.

In response to some “truly weird” recent reports about the long-awaited sixth novel in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, Martin wrote on his blog that “I don’t know which story is more absurd – the one that says the book is finished and I’ve been sitting on it for some nefarious reason, or the one that says I have no pages”.

Both, the author added, are “equally false and moronic”.

The novelist has been working on The Winds of Winter since 2011, when he completed the fifth novel in the series, A Dance With Dragons. Since then, HBO’s television adaptation has brought millions more readers to Martin’s stories of dragons, war and royal dynasties. The seventh television series recently launched, taking the adventures of Martin’s characters far beyond the storylines they have reached in the novels.

At the start of 2016, Martin told his readers that “there’s a lot written. Hundreds of pages. Dozens of chapters … But there’s also a lot still left to write. I am months away still.”

This weekend’s blogpost was his most substantial progress report in months, and suggested it was still possible The Winds of Winter could be published in 2018.

Telling readers that his story Sons of the Dragon, set in the Westeros universe, would be included in the new anthology The Book of Swords, coming out in October, Martin also revealed that he was planning two volumes of his “fake histories” of the Targaryen kings, from the Game of Thrones universe. These will be called Fire and Blood.

“The first of those will cover the history of Westeros from Aegon’s Conquest up to and through the regency of the boy king Aegon III (the Dragonbane). That one is largely written, and will include (for the first time) a complete detailed history of the Targaryen civil war, the Dance of the Dragons,” wrote Martin.

The first volume of Fire and Blood is planned for late 2018 or early 2019, while the second, “which will carry the history from Aegon III up to Robert’s Rebellion, is largely unwritten, so that one will be a few more years in coming,” wrote Martin.

“Whether Winds or the first volume of Fire and Blood will be the first to hit the bookstores is hard to say at this juncture, but I do think you will have a Westeros book from me in 2018 … and who knows, maybe two. A boy can dream,” he added.