BLUESKY…Tiz NOT I

November 18, 2024 at 11:17 am

…At least not yet…

I have heard that I’m now apparently on the social network BlueSky, but alas that’s not me. So if you followed me there I’m sorry to say it’s an imposter. BUT I will likely be starting up an account there soon, so keep an eye out Here on my BLOG or Facebook social page and I’ll let everyone know when I make the switch and what my handle is going to be.

Thanks to all my friends who made me aware of my Bluesky doppelgänger!

THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MINIONS OF FEVRE RIVER

Film Festival Drop

November 17, 2024 at 11:15 am

If you’re around for a Film Festival or two check out UGLY CHICKENS with Felicia Day at the following locations and dates.

We’re so proud of Howards stories coming to life and being able to share them you!

MMRG

LA Skins Film Festival

Shorts Block Program 2

Thursday November 21st at 7p at the TCL Chinese Theater

6801 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028

TUC

Yellowstone International Film Festival

Monday November 18 at 5p-9p

American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Near Barakhamb Metro Station

New Delhi, Delhi 110001

A Stop at Oxford

November 13, 2024 at 8:13 am

Oxford is a legendary place. One of the world’s great universities, and the literary capital of England, rich with history, it has figured in more novels than I can count, including many classic works of fantasy. Philip Pullman’s amazing trilogy HIS DARK MATERIAL is set there. So is BABEL, OR THE NECESSITY FOR VIOLENCE, R.F. Kuang’s Nebula-winning bestseller. It was the model for Hogwart’s in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and a lot of the Potter films were shot there. And of course J.R.R. Tolkien lived and taught there.

Somehow I never made it there on any of my previous visits to the UK, but I was determined to not it miss it this time around. When the Oxford Writers House invited me to join Pullman for a panel discussion on Writing Fantasy, I had to say yes. I had never met Pullman … though I’m a huge fan of HIS DARK MATERIALS, with its daemons and armored bears. (Armored bears! So cool!!) It would have been a thrill to share a platform with him. I also wanted to pop into the Eagle & Child as well, the pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the Inklings got together to share a pint and talk about books.

Alas, it turned out that the Bird & Baby (as the Eagle & Child was nicknamed by the locals) was closed for renovations. And then Philip Pullman got ill, and had to cancel, so I was left to fend for myself.

Fortunately I have lots of practice with fending for myself.

Instead of panel, the event turned into an interview and booksigning. We had a sold out crowd (about 450, they told me) lots of eager students and aspiring writers, and more questions than I could possibly answer if I had been there for a week instead of a day. And beforehand I got a short tour of Oxford itself, which was just as magical as I thought it would be. The library was astonishing, and they even showed me some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s working papers… including his first vision of Helm’s Deep, which he drew on the back of a student essay he was grading.

Oxford was kind enough to record the session, and upload it to YouTube.

After the questions, we moved to the side of the room to sign books. We had a wonderful group of fans and readers on hand. Not all of them were Oxford students; we had people there from all over England, and some from across the Channel as well. Several presented me with handwritten fan letters, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that. The letters were heartfelt, thoughtful, and very knowledgeable about my work. The sort of letters that Tolkien himself might have been moved by.

I had a wonderful time. I only wish our visit had been longer. Oxford was just as fascinating as I hoped it would be, and I could easily have spent days exploring it. But the road goes ever on, and I had promises to keep, so the best we could do was spend the night, and then head off back to London…

But not before we made a stop on the outskirts of town, to visit the graveyard where Tolkien and his wife were laid to read. I could not leave town without paying homage to the greatest fantasist of all time.

But I’ll save my thoughts about that for the next installment of my “travel blog.”

I hope I will be able to return to Oxford the next time I make it over to England. There’s so much left to see.

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Tags: a song of ice and fire, signed books, signings, travels, worldcon, writing

London Towne

November 10, 2024 at 8:47 am

London was the third stop on our summer travels, as July turned to August.

The first time I visited London was way back in 1981. That was also the first time I left the USA, except for the time I went to Canada for the Toronto worldcon in 1993; I was over in the UK for six weeks on that first trip, traveling everywhere from Scotland to Cornwall, on the theory that if I was going to cross that great big ocean, I might as well see everything there was to see. I did not even come close, needless to say, but I loved what I did see… museums and castles, battlefields and bookshops, Hadrian’s Wall and Cecil Court and so much more. I have lost track of how many times I’ve been there since, and yet there’s still so much to see and do. London remains one of my favorite cities.

As usual, we combined business and pleasure, starting with a delightful lunch with my British editor, Jane Johnson, and her team from Harper Collins Voyager.

Across the street from our restaurant a chess game was in progress. Love it.

When I was not doing writer stuff, I did tourist stuff, including a ride in the London Eye. First time I’ve gotten up in it; on previous visits the lines were always too long.

We also took advantage of the West End, and checked out five plays, among them PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS, scripted by Duncan Macmillan, the playwright who is adapting the tourney at Harrenhal for the stage. I think we’re in good hands. Duncan’s play was dark, powerful, and intense. We grabbed a lunch at our hotel a few days before seeing the play, and talked about THE IRON THRONE.

I am told that the show is coming along splendidly. Our team did a run-through for the managers of a score of West End theatres (before we arrrived, alas, so we did not get to see it), and the excitement we palpable, we hear. We have not nailed down our opening day yet (next year, most likely), but it looks as though we will have our choice of theatres.

We also got together with Maisie Williams for pizza and pasta, and talked about… well, no, better not get into that, do not want to jinx it. But it could be so much fun. And we swung by Locke & Co, Hatters, the oldest hat shop in the UK, where Winston Churchill used to get his headware, and we bought some hats. (What else?)

A splendid few days, all in all, but of course the time went by too fast, and it was time to move on.

Oxford was waiting.

Current Mood: happy happy

Tags: theatre, travel

Lift the Torch

October 31, 2024 at 8:48 am

I was born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, a city of about 70,000 just south of Jersey City in the greater New York metropolitan area. Bayonne sits on a peninsula, with New York Bay on one side and Newark Bay on the other, the two of them connected by the deepwater channel called the Kill Von Kull. For most of my childhood I lived across the street from the Kill. I could watch the freighters come and go, day and night, flying flags from all the countries of the world. The Bayonne Bridge, down at the other end of First Street, connected the city to Staten Island. Despite its proximity to the Big Apple, Bayonne was never a suburb; very few of its residents commuted to work, at least back then. Bayonne was its own place, a densely packed industrial city where generations of locals had been born and raised, gone to school, found jobs, got married, had children. Most of them worked blue collar jobs, for Texaco or one of the other oil refineries in town, or for Best Foods, or for Maidenform. Or else they worked on the docks, like my father, a longshoreman. Bayonne was home to a huge naval base, where battleships and destroyers and transports of all types were dry docked and serviced from World War II to Vietnam.

Bayonne was very much a workingman’s city. It was also an ethnic city. We had Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans, and a scattering of other nationalities. Some Protestants and some Jews, but they were heavily outnumbered by the Roman Catholics. Each ethnic group had its own parish, its own church, its own Catholic school… its own feast days and festivals, its own softball teams. There were rivalries between the various ethnicities, there were tasteless jokes… but I do not recall any real hatred. When our parents and grandparents talked about “the old country,” some meant Italy, some meant Poland, some meant Ireland… but they were all Americans now. The things that set them apart were unimportant compared to the things they had in common.

They were all immigrants.

Or the sons and daughters of immigrants. Or the grandsons and granddaughters. Or… well, go back as many generations as you like. My Irish ancestors came over during the potato famine. I am a mongrel myself. Irish, German, Jewish, Italian, a bit of English, a dollop of Welsh… a probably more. I had Irish friends, Italian friends, Jewish friends, you name it. Only a few were first generation, mind you, but everyone knew their heritage, and everyone was proud of it. And proud of being American.

I could see Staten Island from the windows of our apartment in the projects. From the Hook on the northeast shore of Bayonne, however, you could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty.

I wonder, can you see the Statue from Trump Tower? Somehow I doubt it.

Though Lady Liberty was a gift of France (our first friend, and oldest ally) nothing has ever been so quintessentially American. For generations of immigrants, she was the first thing they saw as their ships pulled into New York harbor (steaming past Bayonne and its docks on the way). She stood for all that was best of this new country. For hope. For freedom. For the dream of a new life.

We are a nation of immigrants. Except for my Native American friend, all of us came from somewhere else. Immigrants were not often welcome with open arms. The Dutch were not thrilled when the English took New Amsterdam. The English resented the arrival of so many Irish. The Irish and the Italians did not love each other, and neither of them were thrilled to see so many Poles getting off the ships. And the Jews… nobody wanted the Jews. But in time, all of them learned to get along. There were gangs, there was crime, there were riots… but the immigrants worked together, played together… ate each other’s food, played ball together, slept with each other, married each other to produce mongrels like me. The melting pot worked its magic. We all became Americans. No matter where our parents came from.

Emma Lazarus said it best, in the words on Lady Liberty’s base.

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That’s America to me. The best of America.

MAGA talks of making America great again. But America is great because of its immigrants. They and their descendants built her cities and her railroads, fought in her wars, contested her elections (and stepped aside peacefully when they lost). Far from the “world wide welcome” that Lazarus wrote of, Trump and his followers spew hatred, talk of mass deportations, of denying citizenship even to children born in the USA. They want to ban immigrants who worship the wrong gods and come from the wrong countries. They spew hatred every time they speak of those seeking new lives in America. (They are eating the dogs?).

And who are these people they loathe so much? Why, they are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the “wretched refuse” of those teeming shores. (Billionaires would be welcome, of course. So long as they bring their money). Donald Trump himself is descended from immigrants; German on his father’s side, Scottish on his mother’s. His grandfather may well have been an illegal immigrant; the facts are unclear. The Trumps found welcome with the Mother of Exiles. Now the Donald wants to build a wall to keep everyone else out.

It makes me sad. It makes me sick. Yes, certainly, there are bad people crossing the border. But there were bad people and criminals in all those other waves of immigration too. Those huddled masses are not entirely made up of saints, and never were. Most of the people crossing the border, then as now, were ordinary people, looking for a better life, yearning to breathe free. Dreaming the same dream that the Poles and the Irish and the Chinese and the Russians and all the others did in their day.

“I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Lady Liberty proclaims.

If Trump has his way, that lamp will go out forever.

Current Mood: angry angry

Tags: politics

The Canals of Braavos

October 27, 2024 at 9:42 am

After Ashford, we went to Braavos.

Or Amsterdam, as the Dutch prefer to call it.

A lot of my readers think that Braavos was inspired by Venice. Because of the canals, of course. Thing is, though I’ve read a lot about Venice, histories and travel books and the like, I have never actually been there. I have always wanted to visit, Venice is plainly a magical place, and if I had a bucket list it would be right up near the top… but so far I have never found the time. One day, I hope. When the novel’s done, perhaps. Yes, certainly, there’s some of Venice in Braavos.. the Sealord, and the manner of his choosing, was certainly inspired in part by the Doge… but there’s some of Prague in Braavos too, and bits of other places, along with some things that were purely imaginary. The Titan of Braavos, of course, was my twist on the Colossus of Rhodes. As for those canals…

Did you know that Amsterdam has more canals than Venice?

That startled me as well, the first time I heard it. That was back in 1990, when I visited Amsterdam for the first time, after attending the first (and so far, only) Dutch worldcon in the Hague. That was a good worldcon. I liked what I saw of the Netherlands before the con, the windmills, the countryside, the castles, and the magnificent fireworks display we happened to run into at the Hague… but it was Amsterdam that I fell in love with. There was so much to see and do. Great art in world class museums (the Rijkmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum among them), all the history on display in the Maritime Museum, Indonesian rijsttafels, the coffee houses and “coffee” houses of the old red light district, the beer in the medieval taverns and sidewalk cafes, the tall narrow houses with their pointed roofs, the houseboats along the canals… Day or night, Amsterdam is a gorgeous city.

One of the museums that I had missed on my previous visits to Amsterdam was the Anne Frank House, which should need no introduction. I made certain that we did not miss it this time. I had read Anne Frank’s diary many decades ago, when I was not much older than she had been when she died, and of course I knew the broad outlines of World War II and the Holocaust… but standing in that house, climbing those steps, slipping through the bookcase into the secret rooms where Anne and her family hid during the last years of their lives… there was something profound and moving about that. It is one thing to read of camps and trains, of millions shipped off and millions starved and gassed and killed… but the story of Anne Frank and her family, of the Dutch who helped protect them, of their ultimate capture and betrayal, a story full of hope that ends in death… there’s a power to it that goes beyond all the statistics, that brings home the humanity of Anne and all the others who died in a way no history book can match. There’s often a long line in front of the Anne Frank House, and the wait can sometimes be lengthy… but it is worth it. You will leave there sadder than when you entered… but wiser too, as you contemplate all the horror and heroism of which the human race is capable.

My visit to Amsterdam was not all about museums and sightseeing and Indonesian food; our summer trip combined business and pleasure, as almost all my travel has for the past couple of decades. It had been a decade or more since I last met with my Dutch editors and publishers, and my agents and I agreed that it was past time. So my first stop was at the offices of Luitingh-Sijthoff, to meet the team.

(Megan Ellis, my newest minion, is there in the middle in the black dress, next to me).

And of course, they had a few books for me to sign.

I believe I scribbled in 600 books. Dutch editions, of course.

Afterward, my editors took us out for a lovely dinner at an outdoor cafe, where we were joined by a Dutch filmmaker, a book reviewer… and Melisandre of Asshai, the Red Lady herself, in the person of Carice Van Houten.

Our lodgings in Amsterdam were at the Hotel De L’Europe, a glorious old luxury hotel in the heart of the city, with big rooms, a grand lobby, some fine restaurants… and balconies on many of the suites. Despite the glories of Amsterdam, many a night I found myself unable to sleep after my minions had headed off to bed. Instead I wandered out to my balcony, and sat looking out on the moonlit city while I mulled life and art and the woes of the world. It was a welcome respite from all the conflict that I had been dealing with for the past half year.

The best thing about the hotel was its location, though; right on one of the canals. The canals of Braavos are its glory, and the same is true of Amsterdam. Sid booked us a cruise on a canal boat one afternoon. I had cruised the canals before, on previous visits to Amsterdam, but this was different. We got a private boat just big enough for the three of us, rather than one of the long glassed-in supper boats crowded with tourists, and for close to three hours we wound our way through the waterways of the city.

It was lovely, and peaceful, and ended too soon. Bayonne, New Jersey, where I was born and raised, is nothing at all like Amsterdam… but for my most of my childhood we lived in the projects on First Street, right across from Brady’s Dock and the deep waters of the Kill Von Kull, where the big freighters made their way from New York to Newark. As much as I love Santa Fe, I miss the water.

One of these days I need to write that story about Braavos we were developing for HBO. They shelved that one a couple of years back, alas, but that does not mean I won’t go back to it… after WINDS OF WINTER is done, of course.

Maybe then I will have enough free time to visit Amsterdam again.

Current Mood: contemplative

Tags: life and death, signed books, travel

A Tourney at Ashford

October 10, 2024 at 9:54 am

After Belfast, the next stop on our summer travels was Ashford Meadows, where I’d heard there was a tournament going on. No way I was going to miss that, so off we went. Rumor was that some Targaryen princelings would be attending.

Yes, I am talking about the newest GAME OF THRONES spinoff show. It’s an adaptation of “The Hedge Knight,” the first of my Dunk & Egg stories. There were two more after that, “The Sworn Sword” and “The Mystery Knight.” They have all been collected in a book called A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS. That’s probably going to be the title of the show as well… unless we go with THE HEDGE KNIGHT. That’s still under discussion. Filming wrapped not long ago, and Ira Parker and his team are now in post, looking toward a debut some time next year. Spring, I am hoping, but that’s just a guess, no date has been set yet.

If you haven’t read the Dunk & Egg stories– you ought to, you can grab a copy from your favorite local bookshop, or a signed copy from my own Beastly Books here in Santa Fe — well, “The Hedge Knight” is set some ninety years before A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, during the reign of King Daeron II. You may find the tone quite different from that of GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON; smaller in scale, more personal, with more humor, more focus on character… but there is danger and death as well. Lords and ladies and princes it has, but they share the stage with more smallfolk this time around.

“The Hedge Knight” is a novella of about 30,000 words, much much shorter than the huge novels that make up A SONG OF ICE & FIRE. It was written for LEGENDS, a landmark original anthology edited by Robert Silverberg back in the 90s. Bob invited ten of the leading fantasists of the day to write original never-before-published stories set in their own worlds. It was an all star lineup, featuring Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffery, Terry Goodkind, Tad Williams, Raymond Feist, Ursula Le Guin, Silverbob himself… and me. I am still not quite certain how I got in. At the time, A GAME OF THRONES was the only one of my Westeros novels that had been published, and while it had done okay, its sales did not come close to matching that of the other contributors. LEGENDS was a great book to be in, however, and being in such company won me a lot of new readers.

I had no idea what I would write when I accepted Silverberg’s invitation. A Westeros story, certainly, that was the concept. It could not be a sequel, not without spoiling the things I had in mind for A CLASH OF KINGS and the later volumes. I could do a sidebar, perhaps. A stand-alone story featuring one of my supporting players, maybe. Robert Baratheon before he was king, say. Barristan Selmy might do, or one of his brothers of the Kingsguard… maybe the Sword of the Morning. I could write about Robert’s Rebellion or the Ninepenny Kings, or maybe set something in Oldtown at the Citadel. I mulled all the possibilities. but in the end I decided to go back even further, to a period of Westeros history I had not yet explored at all… virgin territory. And the setting would be…

… a tournament.

Back way when, I saw IVANHOE — the MGM version from 1952, with Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor (she never looked more beautiful), Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, and the best jousting scenes ever put on film — and it left a huge impression on me. The tilts, the battles, the heraldry. I’d featured a tournament in A GAME OF THRONES, to be sure, but that was a sideshow of sorts. I wanted to make the tourney the center of my novella. I did not think any of the other writers in LEGENDS would be doing that.

That was how Dunk & Egg were born.

It may shock and surprise my long-time readers, but I actually delivered “The Hedge Knight” by the deadline Silverberg had given us.

(Barely. Stories for LEGENDS were due by the end of the year, and Bob was very very serious about that. He warned us that anyone who did not have their story in on time would be out of the book. “The Hedge Knight” landed on his desk on December 31. And that only because I used express mail. Whew. Later, Bob told me that three of the other writers came in on the last day too, though, so at least I wasn’t last).

By the time I finished the story, I was in love with Dunk & Egg. Still am. I have written a lot of stories over the decades and created a lot of characters. They are all my literary children… some m0re than others… but Dunk & Egg were special. I mean to write the rest of their tales as well … in my copious spare time after I finish THE WINDS OF WINTER, yes, yes, I know.

Heading up to the shoot, I was as anxious as I was eager. KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS is a smaller show than either GAME OF THRONES or HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, with a much smaller budget, but I really want it to be great. Ninety per cent of the story is set in a field, surrounded by tents, we would not need the huge sets the other shows had featured, but it couldn’t look fake or cheap either, and the costumes and the heraldry and the fights all had to be splendid, and…

I was so so happy when I got there, and saw what Ira and his team had built.

The tourney grounds were one of the first things I saw. The three days I visited were grey and rainy, so there was mud everywhere, but the lists were so real, just right for a place like Ashford, far from the big cities and the great seats of power. As in IVANHOE, multiple jousts could be run at once, rather than having one contest at a time, as in A KNIGHT’S TALE or the tourneys in GAME OF THRONES and HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Meeting the cast and crew was also a thrill. Despite the drizzle and the mud, the excitement on the set was palpable. Everyone I met seemed to be in great spirits, and loved what they were doing.

And Dunk and Egg — Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell , respectively — looked as if they just walked out of the pages of my book, and the chemistry between them was just perfect.

The rest of the cast were wonderful as well. Below is the scene where Dunk first encounters the Fossoway cousins — Ser Steffon (Edward Ashley) and his squire Raymun (Shaun Thomas).

And below we have our director Owen Harris, yours truly, Peter Claffey (Dunk), and showrunner Ira Parker.

And here’s me again, this time with Tanzyn Crawford, who will be playing Tanselle Too-Tall.

And here’s Ti Mikkel, a writer producer on the Dunk & Egg show and part of Ira’s team; also a writer of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Ti has been a big part of all the other spinoffs HBO has been developing. She probably knows more about Westeros than I do.

I could go on and on. Tanselle’s dragon puppet was very cool as well; can’t wait to see it in action. The various Targaryen princelings were not working on the days we were visiting, but I saw some scenes with the Laughing Storm (played by Daniel Ings), and he was outrageous and fun and Baratheon through and through.

Ashford was one of the highlights of our travels.

A few weeks after I got back home, I saw a rough cut of the first episode. I loved it. I can’t wait to see more.

Current Mood: excited excited

Tags: hbo, television, The Hedge Knight

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