And just in time! We’ve had a marvelous time here, but now the castle is being converted to Hogwart’s and rapidly filling up with screaming children in Harry Potter costumes. Aieeee. Run away, run away, run far away…
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Sleeping in a castle. Spent the morning hawking. Too cool.
My head is swimming with ideas for Westeros.
One of the falconers recognized me. Even cooler.
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Having a great, if exhausting, time at Octocon in Dublin. The Irish fen are wonderfully hospitable, and the BWBers are great company, as always.
I am still feeling borderline sick and my time sense is knackered, however. I hit the wall at seemingly random moments and have to stagger off to nap, absolutely canNOT keep my eyes open… but then I sleep for an hour or two, get a second wind, and wake up ready to roar late into the night. Last night I had to collapse after supper, but O staggered down again in time to pick the raffle winners, then partied till three in the morning, swilling down coke after coke and arguing about sex in the books. Somehow I found myself between half a dozen women who want some explicit male/male scenes in the books and a couple of dissenters who don’t… from there we wandered into Myrish swamps and were never seen again…
It was a strange night. Today I’m paying for it.
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Well, I made it to Dublin. My hotel does not have a business center, so I am typing this at an internet cafe on the banks of the Liffey. BWB dinner tomorrow night, and Octocon this weekend.
The trip was gruelling, as ever. Where are the rocket planes I was promised in my youth?
Glad I’m here.
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Life is magical… but kind of crazed at the moment.
I am off to Ireland at the crack of dawn tomorrow, but I took the morning off from packing and the usual last-minute madness to watch the Giants game, a thoroughly dominating win over the Houston Texans on their home turf. Don’t have the time or energy to post about this one in detail… but the game was not nearly as close as I expected. The Giants D looked awesome. Not as many sacks as against the Bears, but they kept the pressure on Texan QB Matt Schaub all game, and completely shut down the NFL’s leading rusher (he won’t be leading after this week, I think). The offense looked pretty good too, except for two awful (and completely unnecessary) picks by ELi in the third quarter. Great game from Hakeem Nicks. For some reason the Texans never seemed to cover him.
That’s it for football for me until mid-November. TIVO will record all the games between then and now for me to watch when I get back.
And now I’m off to ravage Eire and besiege Malta. Later.
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We leave on Monday for Ireland. Seems like I just got back from Australia. Damn, but I’m tired. And still not caught up on all the stuff that piled up here while I was traveling.
Ah, well. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.
Got a million things going down, on a number of fronts. Let me touch on a few.
For those of you who like to hear me pontificate, there’s a new podcast with me up on io9 where I talk with John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtly, holding forth on a wide variety of topics, including the HBO show, Wild Cards, fandom, my comic book projects, the anthologies I’ve been editing with Gardner Dozois, and of course A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, even the infamous Meereenese knot. You can give a listen at http://io9.com/5656513/ — though I should mention that the interview was recorded last spring, and parts of it are already outdated.
On other fronts, got some cool news from my editors at Bantam Spectra. The mass market paperback of A GAME OF THRONES has just gone back to press for its 34th printing. Which normally would not be worthy of note — but as it happens, this new print run will push the paperback over the 1,000,000 copy mark. A lovely round number, I think.
Oh, and for Wild Cards fans, I should mention that Pat (wretched Cowboys fan that he is) of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist is doing one of his famous giveaways for the Tor reissue of the first volume in the series. Check it out at http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2010/10/win-copy-of-wild-cards-1-edited-by.html This new edition will include some extra added content: three brand new stories, never before published, by Carrie Vaughn, Michael Cassutt, and David D. Levine, plus all the text of the original 1987 edition.
SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH, our Jack Vance tribute anthology, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. If you missed the Subterranean limited edition and the Voyager trade hardcover, and have been waiting for a cheaper edition, wait no longer. Harper has just released SONGS in a trade paperback:
Pick up your copy from Amazon UK, or any other online UK bookshop.
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Froggy would like to hint around with you madmen some more, but Andy is too damn tired right now. It’s less than a week before I fly off to Ireland, and I’m still exhausted from the long trip to Australia… so I will forgo the games this time around and just tell you straight out that David & Dan and HB0 have filled two more roles for GAME OF THRONES.
The part of Hot Pie will be played by a newcomer named BEN HAWKEY. And as Lommy Greenhands, we will have EROS VLAHOS, best known for his role in the “Nanny McPhee” movies.
BEN HAWKEY
I hear some of the purists pointing out that Lommy and Hot Pie don’t actually appear in the first novel. You’re not wrong. In the books, they don’t appear until the first Arya chapter of A CLASH OF KINGS… but they’ll be in season one, looks like.
Other announcements should be coming soon, though it’s not likely that I’ll be the one making them. I’ll be packing or flying to Ireland, and afterwards to Malta. We’ve very close to naming actors for the roles of Stiv and Ser Meryn Trant, waiting only HBO approval, and Nina and D&D have been looking at Kevan Lannisters as well. Soon, I think…
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Life is magical and full of joy.
Nice wins by both the Jets and Giants yesterday left me feeling jolly by night’s end. (And believe me, I could use it. I still can’t shed the last dregs of the crud I got on the way back from Australia, the Irish trip is bearing down like a freight train, and for whatever reason I am sleeping very poorly of late).
The Jets beat Buffalo pretty much every way one team can beat another. Offense, defense, throwing, passing, you name it. Well, okay, it was only the Bills, and they look pretty woeful this season… but this is the sort of game that the Same Old Jets of years past would have blown, coming off their emotional, hard-fought victory over Miami the week before. The Jets of old were infamous for losing games they should have won. Sanchez is showing real signs of improvement, the D was solid, and the running game showed up big time. Congrat to LaDainion Tomlinson, who ran like a mother and seems to have found the fountain of youth. Shonn Green got 100 yards as well, and we even had a Joe McKnight sighting (though I still miss little Leon). And next week we get Santonio Holmes back! That should make the O even more formidable.
The Giants game was much closer. I love good defense and I got plenty of it in this night game between two of the NFL’s most storied old-time franchises, the G-Men and the unbeaten (previously) Chicago Bears. Ten sacks, and there could easily have been more. Both Jay Cutler and his backup Todd Collins knocked out of the game, leaving someone named “Caleb Hainie” as QB of the Bears. “Caleb Hainie” sounds like a character out of PETTICOAT JUNCTION, but actually he outplayed both Cutler and Collins in his brief stint. Even so, the game was in doubt well into the fourth quarter. The Bears D, while not as sack-happy as the NY D, was equally stout, and Eli and the boys could not seem to get anything going. All those three-and-outs were especially galling since out new punter really sucks (where have you gone, Jeff Feagles? Manhattan turns its lonely eyes toward you!), so every exchange worsened our field position.
For most of the game the G-Men clung by their fingernails to a 3-0 lead, knowing that one good Bears play was all it would take to put them behind. But finally in the last quarter, to my relief, Eli and Ahmed and Hakeem Nicks made some plays, and the G-Men survived a couple of bad fumbles, scored a pair of touchdowns, and put this one away. Whew.
The Jets have the Vikings next week. The G-Men have to face the red-hot Houston Texans. Uh-oh. We better come to play for that one. Meanwhile, I have a week to savor these wins.
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No, not Kong. Sorry.
However, I’m pleased to report that Gardner Dozois and I have completed work on our original anthology DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS and delivered it to our editors at Penguin Putnam. The final lineup:
THE BASTARD STEPCHILD (introduction), by George R.R. Martin
DEATH BY DAHLIA, by Charlaine Harris (a True Blood story)
THE BLEEDING SHADOW, by Joe R. Lansdale
HUNGRY HEART, by Simon R. Green
STYX AND STONES, by Steven Saylor (a Gordianus story)
PAIN AND SUFFERING, by S.M. Stirling
IT’S STILL THE SAME OLD STORY, by Carrie Vaughn
THE LADY IS A SCREAMER, by Conn Iggulden
HELLBENDER, by Laurie R. King
SHADOW THIEVES, by Glen Cook (a Garrett story)
NO MYSTERY, NO MIRACLE, by Melinda Snodgrass (an Edge story)
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PUZZLE AND A MYSTERY, by M.L.N. Hanover
THE CURIOUS AFFAIR OF THE DEODAND, by Lisa Tuttle
LORD JOHN AND THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES, by Diana Gabaldon (a Lord John novella)
BEWARE THE SNAKE, by John Maddox Roberts (a SPQR story)
IN RED, WITH PEARLS, by Patricia Briggs
THE ADAKIAN EAGLE, by Bradley Denton (novella)
DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS is another of our crossgenre projects, this one a mix of fantasy, science fiction, urban fantasy, hardboiled mystery, historicals, and private eye stories. We’ve got some great stories in the book, and I think you’ll all enjoy the read. No word yet as to when the book will be released, but I’ll be sure and let you know once it’s scheduled.
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Last night I received some sad and sudden tidings. My friend and agent Ralph Vicinanza died on Sunday night, quite unexpectedly, from a cerebral aneurysm. He was only 60 years ago, and seemingly in great health — fit, sharp, full of energy. This comes as a total shock.
An obituary is available on the LOCUS website here http://www.locusmag.com/News/2010/09/ralph-vicinanza-dies/ and I sure that many more obituaries and appreciations will follow. In the world of science fiction and fantasy publishing, Ralph Vicinanza was a giant.
Ralph began his agenting career with the venerable Scott Meredith Agency, handling foreign rights for Meredith’s list, but in the late 70s my own agent, Kirby McCauley, lured him away to establish a foreign rights department for Kirby McCauley Ltd. It was in that capacity that I first met Ralph. Up to then, only a handful of my stories had ever been translated (mostly to German), but Ralph changed all that, and all of sudden my books were being published in a dozen different languages throughout the world. It was as a foreign rights man that Ralph first made his name, and no one has ever been better at it. He established a network of affliates and co-agents all around the world, in every country great and small where books were published, and sold translation rights in places where no one had ever sold them before… for Scott Meredith’s clients, for Kirby’s clients, and finally for his own list. Science fiction and fantasy are global genres today, and my own books and stories have been published in close to forty different languages… thanks to Ralph Vicinanza.
In the 1980s, Ralph and Kirby parted ways, and Ralph established his own agency and began to represent clients on the domestic market. He soon became one of the most important literary agents in New York. Myself, I stayed with Kirby and his sister Kay McCauley for my domestic representation, while Ralph continued to handle all of my foreign language and overseas rights. If you’re one of the millions who have read A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE or any of my other works in a language other than English, it was Ralph who helped to bring it to you. There was never a better foreign rights man.
In the 90s, looking for new words to conquer, Ralph established a west coast operation when he founded the management company Created By with partner Vince Gerardis, to develop feature films and television shows based on the works of Ralph’s clients. When I split from ICM late in that decade, I turned to them, and Created By has represented my work in Hollywood ever since. The HBO series that we are all so excited about would not exist without the efforts of Created By; it was Ralph and Vince who brought the books to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and spearheaded the complex rounds of negotiation that followed. Ralph was to be co-exec producer on the series. It saddens me to think that he will never get to see it.
He was a man of incredible intelligence, endless energy, and quiet competence. A good guy and a great agent. The world of publishing will not be the same without him. Everyone who ever knew or worked with Ralph is feeling devastated today, myself included.
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