George RR Martin
'The Winds of Winter' release date might come as a surprise to the fansReuters

After watching the shocking death of Jon Snow (Kit Harington) in "Game of Thrones" season 5 finale, fans are eager to know about the new developments on the show and George RR Martin's upcoming book "The Winds of Winter".

Showrunner Dan Weiss has already revealed that the character is dead and the answer should be "unambiguous in the minds of the people watching it".

"In a show, everybody sees it for what it is. It's that rule: 'If don't see the body then they're not really dead.' Like when we cut Ned's head off, we didn't want a gory Monty Python geyser of blood, but we needed to see the blade enter his neck and cut out on the frame where the blade was mid-neck," he told Entertainment Weekly.

But the author seems to be waiting for Harington to reprise his role as Snow in the upcoming season of the series. Earlier in an interview with the website, he stated that his readers might not take anything as gospel and that death is never permanent in "A Song of Ice and Fire".

Meanwhile, the writer also believes that there are lots of differences between the verbal and the virtual world. While sharing his thoughts about the show with 92 Y reporter, he revealed that many of the actual locations, such as Croatia and Morocco, were used to portray scenes from the book in the show, but none of them are exactly what he described in his book.

In the mean time, fans have speculated that Harington's character will either be revived by the foreign priestess, Melisandre (Carice van Houten), or his spirit could be kept alive in the living world. However, they will have to wait either for the season 6 of "Game of Thrones" series or for the release of "The Winds of Winter" book to know about his fate.

Talking about his upcoming book, Martin had earlier stated that he will skip several important events, including San Diego Comic Con, to finish "The Winds of Winter". Recently, he informed his fans that he is trying to finish the novel and wrap up other committed projects.

"Life is impossibly busy right now. I am wrestling with the Son of Kong (that is, working on THE WINDS OF WINTER), trying to wrap up a final round of edits and revisions on the twenty-third Wild Cards book (HIGH STAKES), developing three new series concepts for HBO and Cinemax, hiring writers and directors for three short low-budget films I am hoping to produce based on some classic SF short stories (more on that in the months to come) and making my way through the Hugo Packet to prepare to vote," he wrote in Not A Blog.