Kingkiller Chronicle Book 3 Updates & Delays: Why The Doors of Stone Is Taking So Long

An epic fantasy saga where the most recent installment was released in 2011. Where the author has written spinoffs in the years since, but fans are still waiting for the next main sequel. No, it’s not just George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, but also Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle. It’s been 15 years since the second installment, A Wise Man’s Fear, was released, and while there were initially hopes that the third would follow not too long after, the wait goes on for The Doors of Stone.

The title was revealed years ago, but the book itself has not been forthcoming. Thankfully, we have had some short stories to ease the wait: The Lightning Tree and The Slow Regard of Silent Things were both published in 2014, and 2023 brought The Narrow Road Between Desires, a revision and expansion of The Lightning Tree. But just what’s going on with The Doors of Stone, and why has it been delayed so much? Here’s what we know.

Why The Doors of Stone Is Taking So Long

Really, The Doors of Stone‘s delays start with A Wise Man’s Fear. Rothfuss had worked on the saga, beginning with The Name of the Wind, since 1994, before it was eventually published in 2007. In an interview on Fantasy Hotlist that same year, the author said the sequels were written and would be released on an annual schedule, “one per year.” However, when Rothfuss returned to A Wise Man’s Fear, he found it in need of significant changes, which he explained in a post on PatrickRothfuss.com:

“When I finally sat down to work on the book, I realized the draft was much rougher than I remembered. The truth was, I’d been focusing all my energy on Name of the Wind for years while book two just sat their gathering dust. It was pretty shabby when I took a close look at it. Aside from the roughness of the draft, my other problem was the fact that I’d never written to a deadline before. I was going from 14 years of being a hobby writer, straight into being a bestseller, and it was a huge mental adjustment. I was also a bit of an emotional wreck because my mom had died just a few months before the book came out.”

A Wise Man’s Fear wouldn’t actually be released until 2011, three years behind schedule, so that explains some of the delays to The Doors of Stone. Not only was its timeline pushed back anyway, but given the second book changed so much, it’s reasonable to assume even bigger changes would be necessitated to the third installment.

The other consequence of this is how much A Wise Man’s Fear expanded things. It is well over 300 pages longer than The Name of the Wind, and really increases the scope of the story, introducing a lot of new characters, concepts, and locations, taking Kvothe out more into the world and even to the fae realm. This is similar to what we’ve seen with Martin’s struggles on The Winds of Winter, where that huge narrative expansion makes it more complicated to start coalescing things for the endgame.

Another factor at play is that Rothfuss started work on another book set in Temerant, which was provisionally titled The Tale of Laniel Young-Again. The author completed over half of this story, before putting it on hold in order to focus on The Doors of Stone, which adds to the time spent away from the third novel (as can also be seen with the published novellas).

What Patrick Rothfuss Has Said About The Doors Of Stone

Rothfuss has occasionally discussed The Doors of Stone over the years, including at a convention in 2025. There, he reportedly joked to a fan [via Winter is Coming] that the third book was currently “bloated” and “unpublishable.” While said in jest, the latter part of that isn’t terribly surprising given, well, the book hasn’t been published. But the idea of it being bloated is interesting, as it does at least suggest a lot of the book – too much, even – has been written.

In a 2021 interview with Maude’s Book Club on YouTube, he discussed how being “obsessive” had held him back from finishing the book. He mentioned how much time had been spent on the series, and the rewrites of the second installment, and most significantly, that’s he’s obsessing over the fact he “could ruin this thing that so many people have enjoyed.” He also added that he’s been in therapy and struggling personally over the years, something he also talked about in a Twitch stream, where he said:

“I absolutely care about finishing the book… I feel bad about [not giving people what they want] all the time. It’s one of the things that’s f**king me up, I’m in a lot of therapy right now… I went from fiddling around with a book that I just liked to work on and I knew would never be published… then it’s like ‘hey a million people are disappointed in you because they want this book.’ If I didn’t care about the book, you’d have it by now… I owe everyone who loved the book something beautiful.”

Those reasons are understandable, and certainly very human. Rothfuss is very clearly a perfectionist, and a long delay is better than something coming out that the author himself isn’t 100% satisfied with, because that’s then not going to serve the readers either. As much as I’d love to read The Doors of Stone, a person’s wellbeing should always come first.

Before those, updates were of a similar nature: in 2017, he said that writing wasn’t going well; in 2019, he said it was moving forward, just not as fast as he, or anyone else, would like. There was also a surprising update from his publisher at DAW Books, Betsy Wollheim, in 2020, who expressed frustration via comments on Facebook [via Newsweek], saying she didn’t think he’d written anything in years, and that she hadn’t seen “a single word” of the book.

Although the book isn’t finished, we do at least know one part of it: the prologue. Rothfuss read this himself during a fundraiser back in 2021, which you can check out in the video below:

There’s a lot of story to get through and things to tie up, from Kvothe’s time at the University, to Kote in the present, the story with the Chandrian, and some of the central mysteries of the saga: What’s behind the four-plate door? What’s in the thrice-locked chest? Is Kvothe a Lackless? And, of course, who is the king that he kills? It promises to be the biggest entry so far given everything it needs to accomplish, so hopefully The Doors of Stone will be worth the wait.

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