Not a Blog

Lose Some, Win Some

February 21, 2015 at 12:41 pm
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So GAME OF THRONES failed to win either of the Writers Guild Awards it was nominated for. Congrats to THE GOOD WIFE and TRUE DETECTIVE and all the other winners.

All is not lost on the awards front, however. ROGUES won a Stabby!

The Stabby is given by the folks on Reddit. ROGUES won as last year’s best anthology. Which is very cool. Thank you, Redditters. And thanks to my co-editor, Gardner Dozois, and to an amazing lineup of writers, whose talents made the book what it was.

Rogues comp A March 17 lo res

The trophy is very cool as well: an engraved dagger. I have not received mine yet, but here’s a picture of someone else’s:

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I am informed that Gardner Dozois and I will both receive one of these. I’ll post a picture when it turns up. And it will be great to have an award that I can use to stab my enemies. Battering them to death with my Hugos just takes too long.

For a full list of the Stabby winners, go to:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2rh018/best_of_rfantasy_2014_the_results_thread/

Meanwhile, on other fronts, we’ve also been informed that the audiobook of DANGEROUS WOMEN (the previous massive crossgenre anthology that Gardner and I put together) has been nominated for an Audie Award. We’re a finalist in the category of Short Story Collections. For a full list of nominees, check out: https://www.audiopub.org/Audies15/2015_Audie_Awards_Release.pdf

Thanks again to Gardner and to our writers, to Janet Stark and all the great folks at Random House Audio, and to the amazing cast of voice actors and readers they assembled: Claudia Black, Scott Brick, Karen Dotrice, Jonathan Frakes, Iain Glen, Janis Ian, Stana Katic, Inna Korobkina, Jenna Lamia, Lee Meriwether, Emily Rankin, Maggi-Meg Reed, Fred Sanders, Allan Scott-Douglas, Sophie Turner, Harriet Walter, and Jake Weber.

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Awards Time

February 14, 2015 at 1:53 pm
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In Beverly Hills for the Writers Guild Awards. GAME OF THRONES has two nominations. Keep your fingers and toes crossed, boys and girls.

Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day to all. May you shares many hugs and kisses with your honeys.

LATER. Back from the awards. Same old same old. Lost them both.

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Beware… the Dolls Are Coming

February 14, 2015 at 1:16 am
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Never understood why so many people are scared of clowns.

Clowns aren’t creepy.

DOLLS are creepy.

Look at these examples I found on the internet:

crrepy1creepy2

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Whether you love dolls, or are seriously creeped out by them, you will want to be at the Jean Cocteau Cinema on Sunday, March 15, when award-winning editor and anthologist ELLEN DATLOW comes to visit us, with her new book about… you guessed it.

TheDollCollection-400

Watch this space. Tomorrow I will tell you about our CREEPY DOLL CONTEST!

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Janis Is Coming!

February 4, 2015 at 12:34 am
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This announcement really pleases me. One of my favorite singer/ songwriters, the one and only JANIS IAN, will be visiting Santa Fe later this month, and performing two shows at the Jean Cocteau.

Janis is a science fiction and fantasy fan, writer, and editor. I met her at the Philadelphia worldcon a decade and a half ago, and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging with her at a dozen subsequent worldcons. She’s always great company.

I knew her songs decades before I met the singer, though. I had… have… her albums. (Albums… there were large discs made of vinyl, with music on them. You played them on this thing called a turntable. We still have one of those as well). If you’re my age, you know her hits: Jesse, Society’s Child, Between the Lines, Boots Like Emmy Lou’s, When the Party’s Over, Watercolors (a personal favorite)… there are so many… and of course, At Seventeen.

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I’ve wanted to have Janis perform at the Cocteau ever since I reopened the place, and I am thrilled that it is finally going to happen.

She will be doing two shows, on the evenings of Sunday, February 22, and Monday, February 23. I expect both shows to sell out, so get your tickets now:

http://www.jeancocteaucinema.com/film/janis-ian-concert/

You can also call the theatre (during business hours) at 505-466-5528 and purchase tickets over the phone. Please be sure to have your credit card details on hand.

We will also have Janis’s CDs on sale, as well as copies of her autobiography (she has led a pretty interesting life), and I know she’ll be glad to sign them all.

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The Lost Lords — Found!

February 3, 2015 at 11:58 pm
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Telltale Games has released a trailer for “The Lost Lords,” the second episode in their GAME OF THRONES videogame, centering on the travails of House Forrester of the wolfswood, bannermen to the Starks of Winterfell.

Looks pretty nifty. Take a look:

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I haven’t played the game myself, but all the reports I’m hearing are very enthusiastic. My former minion, Ty Franck, helped to write the scenario before he went off to become half of James S.A. Corey, and it looks like he and the Telltale crew did a bang-up job.

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Marathon Time!

February 3, 2015 at 11:45 pm
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Yes, we’re doing it again.

February begins Marathon Month at the Jean Cocteau Cinema. We may not boast the colossal screens of IMAX theatres, but we do have a pretty cool medium-sized screen, bigger than your TV sets, and we’ll be presenting the entire fourth season of GAME OF THRONES on it, starting February 17.

We did think of showing all of the first four seasons, but that’s forty hours of television, and we would have needed to start around Thanksgiving if we wanted weekly screenings. So we decided to restrict ourselves to a single season this time around. We ran the first three seasons last year, after all. And there’s plenty of spectacular fun to be had in season four.

You remember:
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We’ll be showing two episodes a week, on Tuesday nights, for five weeks. The schedule:

TUESDAY February 17 episodes 401 & 402
TUESDAY February 24 episodes 403 & 404
TUESDAY March 3 episodes 405 & 406
TUESDAY March 10 episodes 407 & 408
TUESDAY March 17 episodes 409 & 410

Wherever possible, we will also feature cast members, writers, and directors answering audience questions after the episodes… most via Skype, but we are hoping to arrange some personal appearances as well. Sibel Kekilli and Pedro Pascal have already agreed to Skype in with us. More to come.

The bad news is, sorry, you cannot buy tickets for these shows. The good news is, ALL SCREENINGS ARE FREE. First come, first seated will be the rule, just like it was last year… and do recall, the Cocteau has only 125 – 130 seats. We expect every one to be filled. Last year we had people lining up before the sun rose.

Of course, we will have plenty of GAME OF THRONES merchandise for sale… along with signed books… special Westeros-themed cocktails… and our justly famous buttered popcorn.

See you there, I hope!

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Three Tales, Three Women, One Film

February 3, 2015 at 7:17 pm
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[“There is a girl who goes between the worlds.”

“You can buy anything you might desire from Gray Alys. But it is better not to.”

“When he finally died, Shawn found to her shame that she could not even bury him.”

Some of my younger fans and readers may not realize that my career did not begin with A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. Truth be told, I had been a professional writer for twenty years before I typed the first lines of the as-yet-untitled story that would grow to become A GAME OF THRONES. I had published four novels and half-a-dozen collections, won the Hugo and the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award, written science fiction, horror, and high fantasy.

Most of it in the form of short stories.

The lines above were the openings of three of those short stories:
— “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr,”
— “In the Lost Lands,”
— “Bitterblooms.”

“Laren Dorr” is the oldest of the tales, and probably counts as my first foray into high fantasy. It is a deeply romantic tale, a reworking of a character that I had originally five years earlier, for a story in a comic fanzine that never appeared. I had the notion that I would write a whole series of tales about Sharra, the girl who goes between the worlds. Never got around to that, alas, but in 1992 I revived the concept for another dangerous young woman with the same power — Cat, heroine of my failed ABC pilot DOORWAYS.

“In the Lost Lands” was supposed to launch a series as well. I had in mind a series of loosely connected tales about the enigmatic witch woman Gray Alys, and those who were brave or foolish or desperate enough to treat with her. But I never wrote that second story.

“Bitterblooms” was science fiction rather than fantasy, set on a distant planet in the far far future, and part of my Thousand Worlds sequence… albeit somewhat tangentially. There is a starship in the story, but it’s a derelict, no longer capable of flight. The setting is a world locked in the grip of a deep winter, a winter that lasts for years.

“Laren Dorr” was published in 1976, “Bitterblooms” in 1977, “In the Lost Lands” in 1982. Old work, certainly, but I was always fond of those three stories, and of the three women who starred as the protagonists: Sharra, Gray Alys, and Shawn of Carinhall. None of the stories had anything to do with A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, of course, nor even with each other… but a careful reader can find hints and shadows and seeds of many of the ideas that would later bloom in Westeros in each of them. Still, even so, they remained obscure, known only to a few.

But maybe not for much longer. The German filmmaker CONSTANTIN WERNER, a director, producer, and screenwriter whose previous credits include PAGAN QUEEN, BETTIE PAGE: DARK ANGEL, and DEAD LEAVES (you can learn more about him from his IMDB page, here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1127897/ ) optioned the three stories a few years back, and has woven them together into a screenplay, under the title IN THE LOST LANDS.

And now the project appears to be moving toward production, with the exciting new that Myriad Pictures has signed MILLA JOVOVICH to play Gray Alys.

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Milla is best known to science fiction fans for her starring turns in FIFTH ELEMENT, RESIDENT EVIL, and ULTRAVIOLET. Constantin tells me she’s a big GAME OF THRONES fan too. It’s a thrill to have her be a part of this, and I will look forward to seeing her bring Gray Alys to life. (Maybe I will be so inspired that I’ll finally write those other Gray Alys stories… but no, not until I finish A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, calm down, friends).

For more details about IN THE LOST LANDS, check out the reports in the trades:

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/milla-jovoich-in-the-lost-lands-casting-berlin-1201421451/

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/milla-jovovich-final-talks-star-769165

http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/berlin/european-film-market/myriad-heads-to-efm-with-in-the-lost-lands/5082573.article

JUSTIN CHATWIN will also star in the film, a German-Canadian co-production scheduled to film in Germany. More casting to come, of course.

If any of you would like to read the three original stories, you can find them all in my massive collection GRRM: A RRETROSPECTIVE, also published as DREAMSONGS.

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Season 5 Trailer Unveiled

February 3, 2015 at 11:38 am
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I was at the SuperBowl this past weekend. Great game with a terrible ending. But overall, still an amazing experience.

Others — millions of others, actually — were at IMAX theatres across the land, for the special IMAX screenings of episodes 9 and 10 from the fourth season of GAME OF THRONES. I would have loved to have seen that too, but alas, there’s no Imax near me.

Those who did make it to an Imax saw the first full-length trailer for season five.

For those who were not, like me, here it is in all its glory. Enjoy.

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At the Superbowl

February 1, 2015 at 3:33 pm
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Go Seahawks!!

Deflate the Pats!

LATER: life is meaningless and full of pain.

And that was beyond a doubt the worst play call in the history of the superbowl.

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New Plans for an Old Building

January 29, 2015 at 6:23 pm
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We had a great press conference this morning at the old Silva Lanes, to announce plans for the long-shuttered bowling alley that I bought a few months ago.  Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzalez was on hand to help us launch the project, along with an army of artists, dreamers, and organizers from Meow Wolf, who initiated this sweet madness and will be speaheading the redevelopment.

Lots of reporters and photographers turned up, along with a couple of TV crews.  As their reports come in, I will post links here, for those who are interested.

Here's the ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL:

http://www.abqjournal.com/533497/entertainment/silva-lanes-to-be-transformed-to-an-explorable-art-space-for-kids-and-adults.html

Here's the Santa Fe NEW MEXICAN:

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/martin-meow-wolf-aim-to-revive-old-bowling-alley-space/article_5adc071e-f12e-58a6-ad44-da00177b38ce.html

 Marshall Thompson and Constructive Assets will be handling the renovation and repair of the huge structure on Rufina Circle, which was gutted years ago and has sat abandoned and empty for years.  Just fixing the infrastructure will require months of work.  But once the building is safe and habitable, Meow Wolf's army of amazing young artists will be moving in, to create what we think will be a truly incredible and original piece of immersive art, something that will entertain and enlighten adults and kids both: the House of Eternal Return.

It won't be cheap.  To that end, Meow Wolf has started a Kickstarter.  For a first glimpse of their plans, go to:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/185944623/meow-wolf-art-complex-ft-the-house-of-eternal-retu

Needless to say, contributions are welcome, if you would like to be a part of this.

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