… on the HBO site and YouTube.

The latest installment in the “Artisans” series.

Maisie is amazing. As are Sophie and Isaac, who play Sansa and Bran. The kids haven’t been featured in any of the teasers or trailers to date, but I think you’re going to love them once the show hits the air.

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For all you space opera fans out there, my occasionally loyal assistant Ty Franck and my sometime collaborator Daniel Abraham have a kickass book coming out from Orbit this year. It’s called LEVIATHAN WAKES (not to be confused with Daniel’s short story collection LEVIATHAN WEPT), and it’s the first of a trilogy.

You can see Daniel and Ty talking about it on the Orbit website at

http://www.youtube.com/orbitbooks#p/a/u/2/Yu0xJpCy95o

(Ty is the funny looking one).

Anyway, it’s the best damn book about vomit zombies that you’re ever likely to read. And Ty and Daniel are already halfway done with the second book, which they write on Ty’s day off. I have warned him that if they finish that before I finish DANCE, I’ll have to kill them.

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Over across the water in the fabled British Isles, Sky is getting ready to launch their new “Sky Atlantic” channel, scheduled to debut on February 1. Posters and billboards are going up all over the UK, and in Ireland as well. The ads promote three shows that Sky Atlantic will soon ber featuring: BOARDWALK EMPIRE, MAD MEN, and… GAME OF THRONES.

Billboards have been seen all over London, in Dublin, in Gloucester, Wakefield, Bath… and many more places, I don’t doubt.

One of them popped up ten minutes from where Maisie Williams lives, so Maisie came face to face with Arya, and her mum sent me the picture:

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Life is meaningless and full of pain.

Particularly if you’re a Jets fan.

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Me on MTV. That’s something I never would have figured.

Cool, though. Hey, I always wanted to be a rock star. Or at least a singer/ singwriter. (Why do you think I keep putting “songs” in all my titles?) My complete lack of any singing ability sort of put a damper on that, however. (Although, when plied with sufficient liquor by attractive young women, I can sometimes be persuaded to sing old TV theme songs, or at least as much of them as I remember).

But anyway, here’s me on MTV.

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And just when I thought the night could not possibly get any better, HBO surprised me by showing a brand-new trailer for the series right before the season debut of BIG LOVE.

“The Game Begins,” they call this one. Enjoy.

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Life is magical and full of joy.

What can I possibly say? The game speaks for itself. Rex rules, and the Evil Empire has fallen (this year at least).

Amazing game. Amazing D. Sanchez outplayed Brady (whoda thunk it). All three Jets wideouts made major contributions. Jericho’s long run, that astonishing TD run by Braylon, and of course Santonio’s endzone catch, a mirror image of the one that won the Superbowl for Pittsburgh. (Braylon and Santonio have both proved to be sensational acquisitions).

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Beating Manning and Brady in successive weeks is more than any Jets fan could dare to expect. And now if only we can add Big Ben to the list… get back to work, Rex.

(As an interesting side note, my early 70s story “The Last Super Bowl” predicted a 2014 Superbowl match up between the Packers and the Jets. I also predicted the Jets moving to New Jersey. Of course, everything else in the story was completely wrong, but what the hey… )

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So many painful memories. This one strikes home.

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Will this be the year Gang Green breaks the curse?

We will find out tomorrow at Foxboro.

Meanwhile, two games today. I love the playoffs. Glad I’m here to watch ’em.

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I’m back at home in Santa Fe, after five days in LA for the TCA and Vroman’s signing.

The LA trip was great for me. Yes, it was tiring, and I faded a lot faster than before my hospital stay… but it gave my spirits a huge boost to become George the Writer once again, after the dehumanizing experience of being George the Patient. The TCA was an amazing experience… seeing the new trailer, doing all the interviews (many on video, clips from which you’ll doing be seeing in the future of CNN, E, Sky, and all the other channels that sat me down for questioning), and of course the big panel. That last one I did with David and Dan, Sean Bean, Emilia Clarke, and Peter Dinklage. What a rush.

The Vroman’s signing was also amazing. I’ve heard various estimates of turnout… but considering that it was sort of a last-minute thing, the number of readers who showed up was staggering. I’m sorry we had to cut off inscriptions halfway through the queue, but it was the only was to make certain everyone got at least one book signed.

And all the readers were so kind. I have the best fans in the world. I appreciate all of your good wishes.

Anyway, I’m much stronger now than when I left, and getting better every day… but the work has piled up as well, so tomorrow my nose goes back on the grindstone. For a few hours, anyway. Parris and my docs agree, no more twelve-hour days for a while. So posts here may be less frequent than before. Kong comes first.

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Hello again.

Sorry for the long silence. It was not by choice.

I’ve just lived through the Christmas from hell. Most of it was spent in a bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe. Parris took me in to the hospital emergency room on the morning of Christmas Eve, and they admitted me almost immediately after diagnosis. It seems I had a raging e-coli infection of my urinary tract. Urosepsis, they called it. So I spent Xmas and the days after in a hospital bed, hooked up to catheters and IV tubes, getting some heavy duty doses of antibiotics and some of the other wondrous products of modern medicine.

The good news: the antibiotics worked, and knocked out the infection. I was released a few hours before the end of 2010, and have been recuperating at home ever since. I’m still taking oral antibiotics and various other pills, and will be for a while, but the worst is past… and boy, am I glad to be be out of the hospital.

I was weak as a kitten when first released, and I still tire easily… but I’m stronger every day. Strong enough so that, yes, I still intend to make the trip to LA for the TCA. And yes, I will still be doing the signing at Vroman’s… though it remains to be seen how taxing that will be for me. If you’re attending, I would ask you to go easy on me and only bring a book or two for signing, and not everything I have ever written. I have to watch my strength.

The bad news: well, obviously, there’s nothing like a week in a hospital bed to kick a hole in your plans and good intentions. I did hope to have some exciting announcements to make at TCA, but that won’t be happening now. But hey, all the great stuff HBO will be rolling out about the GAME OF THRONES series should provide excitement enough.

I don’t want to trivilize what I’ve just gone through. I’m a generally healthy guy, and this was the most serious bout of illness I have suffered in decades, and the first time I have seen the inside of a hospital (emergency room visits aside) since 1973. But I am on the mend now, and I expect to be back to my old self by the end of the month at the latest, and back to work well before that.

Until then, though, I probably won’t be posting much here.

Thanks to all of you — friends, fans, readers — for your understanding and good wishes.

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