Ah, spring in Santa Fe… what could be more beautiful… the skies are blue, the days are warm, everything in blooming… especially the damn juniper, which is why my eyes are red and itchy, my nose is stuffed up, and I keep sneezing. Of course, I can just pop a benadryl, and alleviate all my symptoms. That is, if I don’t mind turning into a zombie and sleeping away most of the day.

Which I can’t afford to do, because this is my favorite time of year for another reason as well. Yes, boys and girls, it’s TAX TIME! No, of course, I don’t do my own taxes. I have a wonderful accountant who does them for me, which is a good thing, because my return looks like the Manhattan telephone directory these days. Of course, it still takes me a week bent over little bits of paper to get all my records organized enough to give to my accountant. Every year I swear I’m going to try and keep everything better organized and current, so that tax time is not such a bloody headache… and every year I don’t.

As a good liberal, I don’t actually object to paying taxes (although I would rather they spent more of my money on schools and health care and the space program, and less on bombs and tanks and Halliburton)… but I hate having to deal with all the record keeping. Sometimes the tide of little bits of paper threatens to submerge me entirely. I do find myself envying the folks who get a refund… but not nearly as much as I envy the ones who can still use the short form of blessed memory.

Oh, well. This too will pass, the same way it does every year. And the pollen count will go back down again… until the chamisa starts to bloom, at least.

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Cool. Just a few days after my musings about all the new stuff coming down the pipeline, I finally get to tell you about one of them!

I’m pleased and excited to announce that I’ve signed a deal with Jalic, Inc of East Lansing, Michigan, granting them a license to manufacture and sell full-sized high-quality replicas of the arms and armor from A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.

Jalic is a new company, but its owner and proprietor, Chris Beasley, has been involved with making and selling swords, knives, and fighting steel for a long time, and brings a lot of experience and expertise to the project.

Jalic’s line of Westerosi weaponry will be sold under the name Valyrian Steel… but let me hasten to add that we won’t be restricting ourselves to just the Valyrian blades mentioned in the books. Any of the various weapons featured in the novels are fair game, and we’ve already been kicking around ideas for King Robert’s warhammer, the golden blade of the Kingslayer, and of course Arya’s Needle. “Stick ’em with the pointy end,” indeed!

That’s for later, though. The first Valyrian Steel blade that Jalic will be offering is Jon Snow’s LONGCLAW. Chris and I have been trading emails for months, fine tuning the design, and we finally have one we love. You’ll be able to see it on the news page of my website, along with a fuller version of this announcement.

Meanwhile, check out the website for Valyrian Steel at

http://www.valyriansteel.com/

for more information about Jalic and its plans. Your comments are welcome.

I hope you guys are as excited about this as I am.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go make up some more cool swords…

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It has been a busy, exciting week here in Santa Fe, but alas, I can’t tell you much of what I’ve been doing. Not yet, anyway.

One of the cool things about the success of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE is that it has given birth to all sorts of fun spinoffs — card games, board games, t-shirts, miniatures, maybe even a television series. Other stuff, too. But I can’t talk about that.

Admittedly, when the offers first started to come in, I had my moments of doubt. What did all this stuff have to do with literature? Mark Twain never sold Huckleberry Finn action figures, and F. Scott Fitzgerald never licensed the rights to make THE GREAT GATSBY into a board game. I remembered the words of my old boss, Ron Koslow, who created the tv show BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and always kept a tight rein on what subsidiary rights he would allow to be sold. He wanted Vincent to be a mythic figure, he always liked to say, and never wanted to see him on a lunchbox. I can understand that point of view. Really I can.

On the other hand, long before I was “the American Tolkien,” I was a comic book fanboy… one of the ORIGINAL comic book fanboys, thank you very much, the ones who started comics fandom. And the comic book fanboy thinks that games and cards and miniatures and all that stuff is hot shit. And you know, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that F. Scott WOULD have licensed a Great Gatsby board game if anyone had offered him a nickle for the rights. Maybe it’s not too late…

Anyway, the one thing I did want to be certain of when I started granting these licenses was that the resulting products would be as good as they could possibly be. I did not want my work to be associated with ripoffs or shoddy merchandise, and I refused to be one of these licensors whose participation is limited to cashing the check. I tried to pick companies that I thought would do produce a top-quality product, one that would please my readers. Inevitably that meant involving myself in the approvals process. There’s a good side and bad side to that. On the one hand, having me looking over and commenting on prototypes and drafts during the development phase does help produce a better product (I hope). On the other hand, it takes a hell of a lot more time and energy than I would have dreamed.

And despite all my care and caution, I have to confess, my record with these spinoffs has been… mixed, to say the least. I hit a home run first time out with Fantasy Flight Games, who have produced a wonderful, award-winning card game and board game, and even a terrific art book. And though there have been a few bumpy spots with the comics, I could not be happier with THE HEDGE KNIGHT graphic novel, and expect I will be just as pleased with the forthcoming SWORN SWORD. The RPG, however… well, those who have played the GAME OF THRONES rpg say that Guardians of Order did a terrific job fitting the D20 system to my world, and the book they published is gorgeous, a true labor of love. Unfortunately, Guardians went broke while producing it, leaving the game an orphan. Not to mention all the freelance artists and writers who contributed to the game, who got the rawest deal of all.

Why so much musing on this topic?

There’s lot of news on the license front, that’s all. I have signed four more licenses that I am dying to tell you about… but I can’t, because the licensees want to break the news in their own time. Some will announce our deals at major conventions, others when they launch their new websites. Some soon, some not so soon. Big stuff coming, I hope, and some really cool new collectibles for fans of both A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and WILD CARDS. I have to hold my tongue for the moment. Watch this space, though.

Unfortunately, not all the news is going to be good. It now appears that Guardians of Order was not the only mistake I made when choosing partners. Another one of my deals has also gone sour, for very different reasons, and I have allowed an agreement to expire. I can’t talk about that one either, at least not until the “divorce” is final. Like all splits, it’s a bit sad and a bit painful, and I’m sorry we won’t be able to bring you the great products we had promised. All I can say now that I mean to try and salvage that situation too, and find some new people who will step into the breach and deliver.

I’m tempted to say that maybe Mark Twain was smart to not to let himself get embroiled with Tom Sawyer action figures and Huckleberry Finn bobblehead dolls… but then again, old Sam lost all his money investing in an early experimental typesetting machine, so he made mistakes too.

I guess we all have to learn these lessons the hard way.

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My friend and sometime partner in crime Melinda M. Snodgrass has just launched her new website and blog. The site can be found at

http://www.melindasnodgrass.com/

and I encourage all of Melinda’s friends to go and check it out and leave a calling card.

For those of you who may not be familiar with her work, Melinda has been my assistant editor and right hand on WILD CARDS since the series was first born back in the 1980s. She was the creator of Dr. Tachyon and Dr. Finn, two of our most popular characters, and has a great new character called Double Helix set to debut in the new Wild Cards book, INSIDE STRAIGHT, that Tor will be publishing next January. She and I also collaborated on a couple of screenplays back during my Hollywood days — a WILD CARDS feature film featuring the Turtle and Dr. Tachyon, and an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic, A PRINCESS OF MARS. Neither one ever made, alas, but that’s the way it goes in Hollywood, and we did get wheelbarrows full of money, so it wasn’t all bad.

Snod also wrote some great television and film all by her lonesome, including the now-classic “Measure of a Man” episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, some great episodes of REASONABLE DOUBTS and THE PROFILER, and the pilot for STAR COMMAND, her own SF show, which filmed in Germany (ask her about the robot than ran amuck and smashed the set) and should have been picked up for series, but wasn’t. She’s written a brand new WILD CARDS feature screenplay as well, and is deep in discussions with various Hollywood studios about getting it optioned and filmed, so cross your fingers.

She also has a big new novel coming out from Tor next year.

I shouldn’t be telling you all her news, however. Give her a visit, say hi on her blog, and you can hear it all first hand.

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I have reached a final settlement with Guardians of Order, the Canadian games company that published the role-playing game based on A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE before going under last year.

We’re now all square, and that license has officially expired. It is not the ending that I would have hoped for, but I’m glad to have concluded things amicably.

As part of our settlement, I have acquired the remaining stock of the deluxe, limited edition of the RPG worldbook, a huge and lavishly illustrated hardcover. I will be listing the book for sale on the “Signed Books” page of my website in the very near future, but I thought I’d give my Not-a-Bloggers a little advance notice.

If any of you want to snag a copy, the price is $100, which includes book rate shipping within the United States (overseas is more). This is a big and beautiful book with lots of great artwork, and tons of background material on the world of Westeros that may be of interest even to those who do not play role-playing games. And needless to say, I would be glad to sign and inscribe the book on request. You can get a look at the cover and some of the graphics by scrolling back through the Archives sections of the news page.

(Please email if you are interested, don’t comment about it here).

There will be another RPG in the future. I am considering offers from several other companies right now, and expect to have a new license to announce within the next couple of months.

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It’s good to be home again.

I won’t say it wasn’t a swell trip. We saw friends, had a good time at Boskone and the New York City Comicon, did business, enjoyed a great dinner with my family…

Getting the norovirus in the middle of our travels did kind of suck, however, and then on our way home, Parris had her luggage robbed. Someone opened a locked suitcase and stole her ipod and a whole bunch of new peripherals that she’d just bought at the Apple Store in NYC. They also stole the two locks. (Both brand new “TSA approved” locks, I might add. So far as I can see, locking your luggage with a TSA approved lock is completely useless, since everyone and his brother has the keys. And of course you’re no longer allowed to use locks that might actually keep thieves out of your luggage. It’s all to make us more “secure,” hoo hah).

She’s getting the usual run-around as regards to filing a claim for the stolen items. TSA blames the airline, the airline blames TSA, and no one takes any responsibility. Continental Airlines has been especially useless. TSA and the police have actually been treating Parris with courtesy and doing what they can to help her, but from Continental she’s gotten nothing but phone trees, disconnects, brush-offs from disinterested “customer service” people, and repeated refrains of “it’s not our responsibility” — though indications are that it is the Continental baggage handlers who are the culprits here.

We also had trouble with Continental on the way east, but that was in connection with our carry-on luggage. We were seated in row 19 out of Houston to Boston, yet by the time we were allowed to board ALL the overhead space on the plane had been filled by the passengers seated in rows 20 and back, so an especially obnoxious flight attendant insisted that I check my carry on (not even a wheelie, but a nylon shoulder bag), and threatened to call “security” and have me removed from the plane when I refused to give it to her (the bag contains valuables and personal items that cannot be checked). I told her the bag would fit under the seat, but she refused to believe me, choosing to go by her own three-second “eyeball” inspection of the bag rather than listen to my assurances. That damn bag is TWENTY YEARS OLD and has fit under many airline seats over the decades. I have crossed oceans with the bag under the seat in front of me, I was trying to tell her… but she didn’t want to listen, she just wanted to threaten me with the FAA. Fortunately an older and wiser flight attendant intervened before this young obnoxious one could throw me off the plane, and actually helped, opening an overhead bin, turning one of those monstrous carry-on “rollers” sideways, and making room for my shoulder bag. If not for her, I might have been dragged off my flight.

Anyway, Continental Airlines has moved right to the bottom of our list as “airline we are least likely ever to fly again.” They won’t let you carry on your valuables, and if you check your stuff, they steal it.

But enough venting. We DID have fun on the trip as well, when we weren’t throwing up or being robbed. Boskone is still a great con, although the new hotel is a definite step down, and we had a good time at the New York City Comicon, where I did signings for Tor, Bantam, and DBPro/Marvel, got to meet the entire amazing Dabel clan, and did all sorts of business.

Even so… it IS good to be home.

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