Working Away

July 5, 2011 at 7:16 pm

One more monkey down.

Today I delivered the first draft of “Blackwater” to Dan and David. (Finally) A bit overdue, as always. And probably too long and long expensive, as my scripts always are. (I got to write the Battle of the Blackwater. I tried to be good and restrain myself, but you know how things go. Oh, well. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it).

This is television… (no, it’s not TV, it’s HBO)… so there will undoubtedly be many further drafts and revisions. But the first draft is the hard one.

And it’s a good thing it’s done. On Sunday I leave for the first leg of my US book tour.

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Tags: game of thrones, hbo, scriptwriting

Should Math Be Taught in Schools?

July 4, 2011 at 7:12 pm

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((Sad to say, this parody is hardly exaggerated at all. A few of the answers are almost verbatim to the actual answers of the Miss USA contestants to “Should Evolution Be Taught in Schools.” Go watch that video on YouTube and see for yourself)).

(((There are days I think I am living in the world of Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons.” Just look at reality TV, and remember the hit show in his story)))

(((I am vastly pleased that the eventual Miss USA winner, and GAME OF THRONES fan, does “believe in evolution.” And presuambly in math as well))).

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Tags: humor, politics

I’m Number One…

July 4, 2011 at 11:12 am

… and also number four, number six, and number eight.

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2011-07-10/mass-market-paperback/list.html

When GAME OF THRONES was first published in 1996, it failed to make any bestseller lists (well, maybe it made the LOCUS list, don’t recall), and certainly never got within shouting distance of the Top Ten in the TIMES. While I still recall the highlights (Joe Beth in Lexington, Kentucky and Kepler’s in Menlo Park, California) of that first signing tour, I recall the lowlights even better — the St. Louis signing where the only four people in the cafe/ bookstore actually LEFT when I got up to speak, and the Dallas signing where I drew a dozen people while Clifford the Big Red Dog drew hundreds. And here we are, fifteen years later, with GAME at number one on the list. Where’s that dog now, I want a rematch!

Thanks to David and Dan and HBO, they had a lot to do with this.

And thanks to you, my readers, as well. No promotion, no advertising, no marketing campaign can ever hope to match word of mouth. Without the loyalty and enthusiasm of my fans, none of this would ever have happened.

I hope you all have a great Fourth. It’s certainly going to be a good one for me.

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Tags: a song of ice and fire, game of thrones

Stuff and Nonsense

July 2, 2011 at 11:12 am

Just flipped over the page on my World Wildlife Fund calendar (a day late, sue me), and was amused to see that the featured animals for July are gorillas. Nothing could be more fitting for the month in which Kong is finally loosed upon the reading public. heh

On other fronts… I mentioned below that WARRIORS won the Locus Award as the best anthology of 2010, which pleased me no end… but I forgot to mention that Gardner Dozois and I have just signed with Tor for a sequel of sorts. A mammoth crossgenre book featuring contributions from an all-star lineup of award-winning writers and bestsellers from half a dozen different genres and subgenres. This one has the working title DANGEROUS WOMEN. Whether that will be the final title or not, I am less sure. Must admit, I do not love it; too generic for my taste. I wanted to call the book FEMMES FATALE, but our editor suggested that no one younger than forty would have any idea what that phrase meant. Which boggles the hell out of me, but what do I know? Could be we’ll settle on WOMEN WARRIORS. Though that’s limiting in a different sort of way. But whatever title it goes by in the end, it should be a helluva anthology. We have some great writers lined up, as we did with WARRIORS.

And yes, DANGEROUS WOMEN will include the fourth Dunk & Egg novella, the long-promised tale of their visit to the North, where they encounter the She-Wolves of Winterfell. I could tell you more than that, but then I’d need to kill you.

Meanwhile, Ice & Fire continues its slow conquest of the world, nation by nation and language by language. I’ve just signed a deal for Turkish editions, and we’re negotiating with a Vietnamese publisher as well.

And my US book tour is coming up fast, so these days have been busy ones. At the moment I am finishing up the first draft of my script for the second season of the HBO series, hammering out the overplot of the new Wild Cards book LOWBALL, and of course doing what seems like ten interviews a day. Would that there were four of me.

These are exciting days.

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Tags: a dance with dragons, a song of ice and fire, anthologies, dunk & egg, foreign editions

Signing Tour

July 1, 2011 at 3:05 pm

Though I haven’t quite caught my breath from my tour through Poland and Slovenia, my next trip is already looming — my US signing tour for A DANCE WITH DRAGONS.

I’ve listed the dates and times of all my scheduled appearances here. If you missed those, you can find the basics on my website, on the appearances page.

For more details, including the rules for the signing, check out the latest update on Suvudu:

http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2011/06/on-tour-george-r-r-martin.html?ref=twt_Suvudu_stream

((Comments and questions about the signings should be posted there, not here)).

There’s one huge change from all my past signings and book tours: I will no longer be able to do personalizations. The crowds have simply gotten too big. At my huge signing last week in Ljubljana, Slovenia, I started out personally inscribing the books, as I have always done in the past, but had to cut that off about four hours into the event. If I hadn’t, I might still be there, signing. The same thing happened at my last big US signing, at Vroman’s in Pasadena, and for the same reasons. It takes time to write, “to Charlene, Winter is Coming” or “To Fred, All Good Wishes,” and when you are writing it hundreds of times, well… it makes the lines move considerably slower. And it’s not fair to personalize the books for the front of the line, and not for the poor sods waiting for hours in the back.

So I fear I am going to have to forego personalizations entirely, at least at these mega events. It is not a step I take lightly, or happily, but it has become necessary.

((And as I have said before, for those who really want more of an interaction with me or any of their favorite writers, the place for that is AT A CON, not at a signing. In Poland and Slovenia, those fans who came to the signings got to meet me for a few seconds… but at the con in Nidzica, I hung around for hours at the party, eating kielbasa and drinking vodka. So COME TO RENO! I will be at Comicon as well, yes, but there are 150,000 fans at comicon. At worldcon, we can maybe expect 4,000.))

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Tags: a dance with dragons, signings

Wild Cards Times Two

June 30, 2011 at 1:15 pm

FORT FREAK is here!

The latest volume in the Wild Cards series was released on June 21, while I was touring and signing in Poland. You can pick up a copy now from your favorite local bookstore, or order one from your favorite online retailer.

After the wide-ranging global storylines of the Committee triad, FORT FREAK returns to New York City, the epicenter of the Wild Cards universe, to tell the stories of the cops and crooks of the historic 5th precinct of the NYPD !” the Jokertown precinct.

The lineup this time around includes stories by Wild Cards veterans Melinda Snodgrass, Stephen Leigh, John Jos. Miller, Kevin Andrew Murphy, and Victor Milan, and introduces newcomers (new to Wild Cards, at least) Cherie Priest, David Anthony Durham, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Ty Franck, and Paul Cornell. You can check out a sample of Cherie’s interstitial, the literary mortar that holds all the bricks together, on my website… and read Melinda’s story, “The Rook,” on Tor.com at http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/06/the-rook

So come meet Ramshead, the Rook, Tabby, SlimJim, Abigail the understudy, Sgt. Squinch, Ratboy and Flipper, Tinkerbill, the Infamous Black Tongue, Natya, Maggie Graves, Puff, Beastie, Dr. Dildo, and the other colorful denizens of Fort Freak and environs. Old-timers like Father Squid, the Sleeper, and the Oddity also turn up to enliven the proceedings.

Also… some more good news for the Wild Cards fans out there. The seventeenth volume in the series, John Jos. Miller’s novel DEATH DRAWS FIVE, was released in hardcover just a week before its publisher (iBooks) went bankrupt, and very few copies ever made it to market. As a result, this volume of the series has been near impossible to find, commanding huge prices from dealers on the secondary market.

But at long last Brick Tower Press, who acquired many of the assets of iBooks in the bankruptcy proceedings, has released a paperback edition. It’s available on Amazon at

http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Cards-Death-Draws-Five/dp/187696345X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1309200578&sr=1-1

and may also be turning up at some local bookstores.

DEATH DRAWS FIVE is a tale of fists, faith, and armageddon in America’s heartland, the novel features John’s asskicker ace Billy Ray (aka Carnifex), the long-time fan favorite Fortunato and his son John Fortune, and the shape-shifting private dick Mr. Nobody, along with John Nighthawk, the Midnight Angel, and a host of other new characters. In many ways it is the last of the “original series” of Wild Cards, before the introduction of the “next generation” cast featured in INSIDE STRAIGHT and subsequent volumes.

So for all those readers who have been looking to fill the hole in your Wild Cards collection, here’s your chance to complete your sets.

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Tags: wild cards

WARRIORS Wins Locus Poll

June 29, 2011 at 10:30 am

I’m delighted to announce that WARRIORS, the gigantic cross-genre anthology that I co-edited with my old friend Gardner Dozois, has won the Locus Award as the Best Anthology of 2010.

The award is given by LOCUS magazine, the PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY of science fiction and fantasy, and is decided by an annual poll of of the magazine’s readers. You can check out the full results on Tor.com here: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/announcing-the-2011-locus-award-winners

Gardner and I are very proud of WARRIORS, our tilting-at-windmills attempt to smash down some genre barriers, and we’re thrilled to see it cop this prize over some terrific competition, all of them pure SF and fantasy. My thanks to all our contributors, who helped make the book what it is. Without them, WARRIORS would be… well, a big book of blank pages. And thanks as well to Tom Doherty, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, and all the other folks at Tor.

In other categories, Neil Gaiman took home the prize for Best Short Story for “The Thing About Cassandra,” originally published in another of the anthologies that Gardner and I have edited, SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH. Congratulations to Neil. A well deserved award for a great story.

In novella, my own contender “The Mystery Knight” was among the finalists, but lost out to Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” Tough competition, that. Congratulations to the winner… and don’t worry, Dunk & Egg will have other chances in the years to come.

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Tags: anthologies, locus awards, tor

A Day in Slovenia

June 29, 2011 at 8:06 am

Some highlights from my recent visit to Slovenia. From AljaÅ¾ PotoÄnik, who followed us around for most of the day.

http://www.dnevnik.si/novice/kultura/1042454378

The news article is in Slovenian, but the video features me speaking English. (What else? That’s all I speak). Bits from my introductory Slovenian press conference and my signing in Koper (the small one, not the monstrous one in Ljubljana) are included… along with highlights of my visit to the amazing Predjama Castle, which appears to double as the Slovenian version of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre as well as being an astonishing fortress-in-a-cave.

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Tags: foreign editions, travels

Amazon Screws the Pooch

June 29, 2011 at 7:57 am

People are posting all sorts of off-topic comments on my Miss USA post, below, so I am going to close that one and address the news about Amazon.de here.

Yes, I know, Amazon Germany screwed up big time and started shipping A DANCE WITH DRAGONS before they were supposed to. I am told that about 180 copies got out before they were made aware of their mistake and shut down shipping.

I am not happy about this. My publishers are furious.

If we find out who is responsible, we will mount his head on a spike.

Some other retailers are making noises about releasing their own stocks early, using the Amazon error as a justification. They are not supposed to do this. If you hear of anyone actually selling or shipping copies in advance of the publication date, please inform me ASAP.

I know that the 180 readers who got advance copies are happy about this, but I assure you, my publishers are not. And thousands of other readers are now getting spoiled, most quite inadvertently and unwillingly, as they stumble over the spoilers cropping up everywhere on the internet. (Some of the spoilers being posted are false, by the way). Most of those “lucky” 180 are keeping mum, to be sure, but there are always a few jerkwads in any group, and those are the ones who cannot keep their mouths shut.

A mess all around.

All I can say is, pfui.

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Tags: a dance with dragons

Carrie Vaughn Writes Wraith

June 28, 2011 at 8:31 am

Wild Cards fans take note… Tor.com is now offering a free read of Carrie Vaughn’s “Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan,” one of the three brand-new originals in the new edition of WILD CARDS (volume one). You can find it here:

http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/06/ghost-girl-takes-manhattan

Wraith AND the Sleeper… what more could you want? So what are you waiting for?

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Tags: tor, wild cards

Not a Blog

Working Away

Should Math Be Taught in Schools?

I’m Number One…

Stuff and Nonsense

Signing Tour

Wild Cards Times Two

WARRIORS Wins Locus Poll

A Day in Slovenia

Amazon Screws the Pooch

Carrie Vaughn Writes Wraith

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