Authors don't owe their fans a next installment in the series. They do however, owe the fans a little bit of honesty. In 2015 George RR Martin said he's going

Authors don't owe their fans a next installment in the series. They do however, owe the fans a little bit of honesty. In 2015 George RR Martin said he's going to skip comic-con in 2015 because he needs to focus on finish off winds of winter, but hey! If he gets it done before hand, he'll come to comic-con. That was 6 years after this blogpost complaining that people have unreasonable expectations that George RR Martin will deliver winds of winter. The problem isn't that Martin hasn't delivered the book, it's that he has a massive problem communicating with his fans about whether he's going to deliver the book. He's repeatedly done this, and people question why the fans are angry. They're angry because he's jerking them around. It's not even unreasonable for him to make promises to the fans and then fail to deliver. But there comes a point where it's reasonable for people to be angry at him for continuing to make predictions/statements about the book when he's got such a well-established pattern of breaking those promises. It's reasonable for Charlie Brown to get angry when Lucy pulls the football out of the way at the last minute - it's not because she owed him the football, it's that she lied to him, repeatedly.