Nightmarish day yesterday. The computer virus that we’ve been battling for weeks… often hammering it down, but never entirely eradicating it… upsurged again, and totally messed my Windows machine, so Ty had to spend the whole day dealing with it, and I could never get on line to read my emails.

He was finally successful, so I’m back in business. In fact, the computer is running better than it has for weeks. Maybe Ty has finally slain the beast. But I won’t celebrate too soon.

Of course, just one single day away from my email meant that I had more than a hundred letters in my inbox when I did get back on this morning. ONE DAY! Aieeee….

On other fronts, I see that Mo Ryan broke the Charles Dance casting while I was in computer hell. Yay, Mo. I’m very pleased by this one, and will post more about it later. Got a couple other castings I should talk about as well… but it has dawned on me that there’s no way I can talk about them ALL. Not if I want to do anything else. There are just so many.

The first week of shooting in Belfast went well, I hear, although the weather screwed with them a bit and pretty much confined them to the Paint Hall. Wish I could have been there.

I missed the San Diego Comicon as well, as previously posted. But I did have a presence. IDW announced the DOORWAYS comic, as below… and Bantam Specta debuted the gorgeous new 2011 Ice & Fire calendar, with its stunning Ted Nasmith art.

The calendar is now officially on sale and available, at all good bookstores that sell calendars. Also on Amazon. And they are shipping now. People are already receiving their calendars. Yes, we thought we would try something new this time, like actually sending people the calendars that they order. I hope you like this innovation. (This is not an invitation to rehash the mess we had with the 2009 calendar. That horse is dead. We know, we know. Believe me, we know).

Oh, and I also wanted to mention LIGHTSPEED, a new on-line SF magazine edited by the talented John Joseph Adams. Their current issue reprints a story by some Martin guy from the dawn of time, called “… for a single yesterday.” You can read it here:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/for-a-single-yesterday/

The way LIGHTSPEED works, JJA informs me, “you can read all of our content for free, but it’s serialized on the website throughout the month, one story and one article per week. If you want to read the week 4 story now–or if you just want it in convenient downloadable formats–you can just buy the ebook version.”

So: electronic magazines. Wave of the future.

Finally, might mention that I finished a chapter of the DANCE today. I had one last chapter about this particular character — I will call him Fred — to finish, and then I am done with him for the book. Of course, in the writing, it turned into three chapters. So I finished a Fred chapter a week ago, and a Fred chapter an hour ago, and yet I STILL have one Fred chapter to finish. Sigh. The horizon recedes continuously before me.

Time to go eat supper. Bye.

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