With HBO’s Game of Thrones Season 3 rounding up for another year, George R.R Martin has been doing quite a few interviews and while he has vowed never to speculate exactly on a release date for The Winds of Winter, he has hinted at a time frame when we might expect it to be published.

A few notes first: I’ve included links to all the sources so that you can decide on your own whether these conclusions are accurate or farfetched. Please be warned that the following may contain spoilers, particularly when revealing which characters appear in The Winds of Winter and thus also revealing those who have survived the previous books.

In an interview with O Globo, a Portuguese publication, Martin was asked whether he could speak on how much longer until the release of The Winds of Winter and this is how he responded:

“I will not make any predictions. I’m working on it, I’m making progress, but it is a great book. Definitely will not be ready this year, maybe next. But for me it’s one step at a time, I try to focus on small things, like finishing a chapter or a page. The book will be ready when it’s ready.” O Globo

He was tight lipped about answering any specific questions about his progress such as how many pages he’s written so far, but he did give a little clue about what character he was writing at the moment. “Arya.”

In an interview with Conan, George R.R. Martin said, “My great fear is that David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] will catch up with me,” referring to the Game of Thrones television writers. It seems likely that they will catch up with Martin, given the time between publication. It took Martin 6 years to publish A Dance with Dragons after the release of A Feast for Crows.

But how long will we have to wait for The Winds of Winter? According to an interview with The Guardian in 2011, Martin said that he predicted, “it’s going to take me three years to finish the next one at a good pace.” So say he was right in his estimation, and together what he told O Globo, we may be looking at a late 2014/2015 release of The Winds of Winter. Who knows when A Dream of Spring, the final book, will be published.

What can we expect when The Winds of Winter is finally released? Some information has been revealed:

In 2012 Martin told SmartTraveler that A Dance with Dragons covered less story than he had intended, omitting at least one planned large battle sequence and leaving several character threads ending in cliff-hangers. Martin intended to resolve these cliffhangers “very early” in The Winds of Winter, saying “I’m going to open [The Winds of Winter] with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle of Slaver’s Bay. And then take it from there.”

Obviously because there may be people reading this article who have not finished reading A Dance with Dragons, I won’t reveal some of hints for the plot because it would reveal some of the events that occurred in the previous books. There’s a few more details on the AWOIAF wiki page for The Winds of Winter.

But here are the character that Martin has said will have chapters written from their POV in The Winds of Winter: