If you’re like us, you’re likely still recovering from the epic conclusion to Game of Thrones’ sixth season. Sadly, it appears as if the ever-long wait for the next season is to be a little bit of a longer wait than normal.

Show co-creator D.B. Weiss explained to the UFC Unfiltered podcast that production on Season 7 is to start later than usual. The reason is that, rather than winter coming, winter is now here.

Weiss elucidated, “We don’t have an air date yet, but this year will probably be a bit later. We’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, winter is here. And that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes any more. So we’ve kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot.”

Yes, for six seasons we’ve been hearing about how winter is coming, and now it’s finally arrived.

Usually, we’d expect Game of Thrones to debut its new season in April, but the wait for grimmer weather is meaning a later start date. In fairness, the next (and supposedly final) two seasons are only going to be seven episodes a piece rather than the standard ten, so that also has to be taken into consideration when looking at when we can expect Season 7 to arrive.

Chances are, the seventh season will arrive later than April but still finish at roughly the same time of year as previous seasons due to a shorter amount of episodes. Either way, it’s going to take us a long, long time to come to terms with how the final two episodes of Season 6 played out.

Expect more on the next season of Game of Thrones as it becomes available.