The third Game of Thrones show has launched as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. And with it, fantasy series author George RR Martin has been doing the press rounds. Having appeared in an interview at the Oxford Union in England, the 77-year-old was asked if A Song of Ice and Fire – of which he still has two books to write, including The Winds of Winter – would end the same way as the Game of Thrones TV show. After all, the showrunners had to complete the small-screen story using Martin’s bullet-pointed planned story arc.

Martin interrupted the interviewer to shut down this fan theory, injecting: “The books are not going to end that way.” Here’s the thing, though, George, will they ever be finished? That’s when he admitted a fan recently asked what his main regret in life was.

Martin confessed: “My main regret is the books aren’t done yet and I still have two [to get] done. Honestly, I really never thought that would happen. By the time we sold these books to HBO, I had four books already published and I was making a lot of progress on the fifth … these books are like this [widens hands], how could they possibly catch up to me? But they did … And a great part of that is my fault”