Okay, all this is news to me, especially the bit about the magazine.
Which, y’know, I’m figuring is more wishful thinking than an actual fact.
http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/08/game-of-thrones-to-premiere-in-spring.html
But I’ve got to admit, it would be COOOOL.
Dr. Hook put it much better than I can.
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Another chapter done.
And another character. This wraps up Yogi for the book. The Meereenese knot is hanging by a thread. One more good slash and it may finally part.
That’s eight characters completed. Not counting the prologue or epilogue.
Course, there’s still more to due. Got to get back to shoveling Snow soon, and there’s still Fred hanging on, but first I need to hack at that blasted knot some more.
(Some year all this will make sense to you. Assuming anyone still cares).
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August? August? AUGUST??? How the hell did it get to be August? What happened to July? Who took June?
Argh.
Well, I had to turn over the page on my World Wildlife Fund calendar. The big gorilla has been replaced by elephants. But Kong is not yet subdued. So much for omens.
Perhaps for the next month it is my fate to wrestle Dumbo. How am I gonna beat Dumbo? He FLIES.
I actually had a very good day today, writing about a character who wasn’t originally supposed to be a POV, but has turned out to be sharpest sword I’ve got for slicing through the Meereenese knot. I’d feel very good about that, except somehow it has become AUGUST. With worldcon bearing down on me like a freight train.
Sorry. Sorry. Don’t mean to rave. Got to remember my mantra. One page at a time. One sentence at a time. One word at a time.
Here’s a nicer memory of August, from the old 2009 calendar:
Would that it were actually August 2009 instead of August 2010.
Bye for now. I have to feed the elephant.
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Coming in November…
For all those Wild Cards fans, both old and new, who have been complaining that the original series is impossible to find, and too damn expenseive when you do find it, I’m pleased to announce that Tor will be releasing a new edition of the first volume in the series, WILD CARDS, this November.
Here’s an advance peek at the cover mock-up, which once again features the gorgeous art of Michael Komarck.
The new edition will be in trade paperback format.
If you’ve enjoyed INSIDE STRAIGHT, BUSTED FLUSH, and SUICIDE KINGS (and if not, you should), and wanted to know how it all began, here’s your chance to start at the beginning.
Longtime fans of the series will recall that WILD CARDS is our historical volume, with stories that took us all the way from Dr. Tachyon’s arrival on Earth in 1946 right up to the Wild Card “present” — which was 1986 back when the book came out in 1987. We had forty years to cover, and we covered it pretty well… but of course, there were gaps. Years and even decades of Wild Card history that we simply did not have the space to dramatize.
Tor’s new edition will help rectify that. We’re not just reprinting volume one as it was first published; we’re adding three brand-new, original, never-before-published stories set during some of the “lost years” we couldn’t cover last time around. So this edition of WILD CARDS will be fortified with original content, extra fiber, and three news tale:
– Michael Cassutt will take us back to 1956 with, “Captain Cathode v the Secret Ace,”
– David D. Levine will visit 1960, to tell us about “Powers,” and,
– Carrie Vaughn will show us 1981, as “Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan.”
We think these will be three terrific new additions to the Wild Cards saga, and we’re excited about the chance to present them to you.
November is looking to be a big, big month for me. In addition to WILD CARDS, that month will also see the release of SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH, the big new cross-genre romance/ fantasy anthology that Gardner Dozois and I have edited. AND I’ll be showing up in Minnesota for Fantasy Flight’s “Days of Ice and Fire.”
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Still have that final Fred chapter to finish. Sometimes it’s good to change gears, though, so I did that today, and completed the last Barney chapter.
So that’s one more viewpoint done with, at least.
If only I didn’t have so many of them…
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Hiya kids, hiya, hiya.
You’re too dumb to make this soup the way they’re making it in Belfast. Start with Becky, Tom, and Boss. Take away two fathoms. Now you want the second course. In the dark the breaker of rocks seeks the living stone. But take away the fat guy with six wives, and the babe with the bumbershoot as well, that salty wench. Out, out. What’s left tastes good, but just remember, there is no gamecock in aurochs stew. IMDB? What’s that? I’m Dumb Boy? Won’t help you here, no way, no how.
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No, this is not the promised post about Charles Dance. Later.
Just kicked Aeron Damphair’s scraggly arse out of DANCE WITH DRAGONS. He only had the only chapter, and it will work better early in the next book than late in this one. (That’s how it looks to me today, anyway. I reserve the right to change my mind).
So DANCE has gotten a smidge shorter. But is still not done.
The good news is that I seem to have written more than a hundred pages of THE WINDS OF WINTER already.
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Nightmarish day yesterday. The computer virus that we’ve been battling for weeks… often hammering it down, but never entirely eradicating it… upsurged again, and totally messed my Windows machine, so Ty had to spend the whole day dealing with it, and I could never get on line to read my emails.
He was finally successful, so I’m back in business. In fact, the computer is running better than it has for weeks. Maybe Ty has finally slain the beast. But I won’t celebrate too soon.
Of course, just one single day away from my email meant that I had more than a hundred letters in my inbox when I did get back on this morning. ONE DAY! Aieeee….
On other fronts, I see that Mo Ryan broke the Charles Dance casting while I was in computer hell. Yay, Mo. I’m very pleased by this one, and will post more about it later. Got a couple other castings I should talk about as well… but it has dawned on me that there’s no way I can talk about them ALL. Not if I want to do anything else. There are just so many.
The first week of shooting in Belfast went well, I hear, although the weather screwed with them a bit and pretty much confined them to the Paint Hall. Wish I could have been there.
I missed the San Diego Comicon as well, as previously posted. But I did have a presence. IDW announced the DOORWAYS comic, as below… and Bantam Specta debuted the gorgeous new 2011 Ice & Fire calendar, with its stunning Ted Nasmith art.
The calendar is now officially on sale and available, at all good bookstores that sell calendars. Also on Amazon. And they are shipping now. People are already receiving their calendars. Yes, we thought we would try something new this time, like actually sending people the calendars that they order. I hope you like this innovation. (This is not an invitation to rehash the mess we had with the 2009 calendar. That horse is dead. We know, we know. Believe me, we know).
Oh, and I also wanted to mention LIGHTSPEED, a new on-line SF magazine edited by the talented John Joseph Adams. Their current issue reprints a story by some Martin guy from the dawn of time, called “… for a single yesterday.” You can read it here:
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/for-a-single-yesterday/
The way LIGHTSPEED works, JJA informs me, “you can read all of our content for free, but it’s serialized on the website throughout the month, one story and one article per week. If you want to read the week 4 story now–or if you just want it in convenient downloadable formats–you can just buy the ebook version.”
So: electronic magazines. Wave of the future.
Finally, might mention that I finished a chapter of the DANCE today. I had one last chapter about this particular character — I will call him Fred — to finish, and then I am done with him for the book. Of course, in the writing, it turned into three chapters. So I finished a Fred chapter a week ago, and a Fred chapter an hour ago, and yet I STILL have one Fred chapter to finish. Sigh. The horizon recedes continuously before me.
Time to go eat supper. Bye.
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My readers in the UK have been emailing me for months, wanting to know whether GAME OF THRONES would be shown over there. The answer (I hoped) was “yes,” but I could not give details, because (1) I didn’t know, actually, and (2) some major negotiations were going on behind the scenes.
But now the GUARDIAN has broken the story, so all can be told:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/29/bskyb-buys-hbo-tv-catalogue
The short version: SKY has bought the UK rights to the entire HBO catalog of original shows, past and present.
So, yes, GAME OF THRONES will be seen in the UK… on SKY.
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And it did not take you very damn long to figure out the second role as well.
The part of Shae, the camp follower that Bronn the sellsword finds before the battle of the Green Fork and delivers to Tyrion Lannister, will be played by the amazing SIBEL KEKILLI.
Shae needs no introduction to any Ice & Fire reader, I would imagine. If you’ve forgotten her, you obviously weren’t paying attention, so get off the internet at once and go and reread the books. There may be a pop quiz.
Sibel Kekilli is a German actress of Turkish descent, who crashed onto the film scene in a big way in 2004 in an award-winning film called HEAD-ON, after being discovered by the casting director while shopping in a mall in Cologne. She’s won both the Bambi Prize (the deer) and the Lola Award (cherry cola, L-O-L-A Lola, and if you missed that clue, you obviously haven’t been listening to enough Kinks). The Lola is the “German Oscar,” and Sibel has actually won it twice. She’s also won the Tribeca Award and the Golden Orange Prize.
I want to say a few words about her audition, which I thought was extraordinary. A lot of beautiful young women read for Shae. The scene they were reading was the first meeting between Shae and Tyrion, in his tent on the Green Fork the night before the battle. Shae is a camp follower, a prostitute, and she is, of course, coming on to Tyrion in a big way. There is a LOT of sexual heat in the scene, as written and as played. And all of our Shaes were sexy as hell. Watching them one after another would fog up anyone’s glasses.
But there’s another dimension to Shae as well. She’s not as practiced and hardened at this as a more seasoned pro. There’s still a girl next door quality to her, a sense of vulnerability, playfulness, and, yes, innocence. And it’s that quality Tyrion responds to, that quality that brings him back to Shae, and drives all that follows. He knows what she is, consciously, but down deep he wants to believe that he has found another Tysha.
All of our Shaes were hot as hell. But only a handful of them captured that other quality, maybe three out of twenty, and Sibel was the standout. It’s easy to see why she has won all those awards. Watching those auditions, any red-blooded male would want to take every one of our Shae candidates to bed. But Sibel made you fall in love with her as well.
She’s going to be amazing. And I can’t believe you figured out who she was so fast!
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