Has it really been more than a month since my last update? Hard to believe. Sometimes I don’t know where the days go.

Parris flew off to Ireland a few weeks ago for a well-deserved vacation, and left me here chained to the computer to work on A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. Very cruel of her, I must say, but I am getting some writing done, so I suppose it worked. All the same, the two houses seem very empty without her. More so since we are moving all the furnishings and most of the Stuff out of the main house so we can finally begin our long-planned and much-postponed renovations, which I fully expect to make my life a living hell for the next four months. Emptying the place out has been a major project in and of itself. It is staggering how much Stuff we have. Rooms and rooms and rooms of Stuff, books and clothes and books and furniture and books and music(vinyl) and books and music (CDs) and books and keepsakes and books and mementos and books and more clothing and books and more furnishings and books and… my unread shelf alone filled twenty-two boxes. (And those are just MY unread books, Parris has her own). I have enough unread books to keep me reading for several decades. I never need to buy another book. But somehow I suspect I will.

The end is almost in sight, though. We’ve filled up three storage lockers, and I am now living mostly in my “office house,” across the street from the main house. It’s crammed to the gills and chaotic, needless to say, but I suppose I am lucky. Not everybody has a second house across the street to take refuge in while their home is being renovated. Checking into a hotel for four months might be more pleasant in some regards, but I doubt that I’d be able to get much work done in a hotel room, so I’ll just grit my teeth and keep repeating, “It will be over in four months, it will be over in four months.”

Lots of other stuff going on that I can’t talk about yet… but do keep an eye on my news page. There are some exciting projects coming down the pike that I expect to be able to announce shortly. (I never like to announce anything until the contracts are signed. Superstition, I suppose, but it has served me in good stead. It’s embarrassing to tell the world about some exciting new deal or book or spin-off, and then have the thing fall apart on you).

Oh, and I suppose you want to know how the DANCE is coming? Work continues. I finished the revisions on the Jon Snow chapters that I was talking about last month, and moved on to Tyrion for a while, but just now I am working on a new viewpoint character, and a chapter set in steamy harbor of Old Volantis. Where I shall be returning, first thing tomorrow.

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