
Great blog post from TIME magazine’s TV critic, urging HBO to pick up ICE & FIRE.
http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/07/06/hbos-next-i-hope-great-drama
Needless to say, I share his hopes.
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Great blog post from TIME magazine’s TV critic, urging HBO to pick up ICE & FIRE.
http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/07/06/hbos-next-i-hope-great-drama
Needless to say, I share his hopes.
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Back home, safe and sound. Finland was great and I enjoyed my visit to Estonia as well. More on both later. The journey home was endless and exhausting, and god, I hate the TSA, especially the ones at Chicago O’Hare. Petty pseudopolice drunk on their authority. But never mind.
Tons of emails, a mountain of mail, much sleep to catch up on. I’ll be digging out from under for a while. But lots of cool stuff happening too, on all sorts of fronts. I’ll post what I can when I can.
Next trip on the schedule is worldcon in Montreal. I have my program for that, and will post it here soon. I’m hoping to complete a few more chapters for DANCE before taking off. Still tugging, slashing, and cursing that Meereenese knot.
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We’re back in Helsinki for one last night. Tomorrow at the crack of dawn (which cracks very very early here in Finland) we’re off again. Parris returns to Ireland, and I head home to the cats, the green chile, and A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. We’ll meet again in Montreal. Ah, the jet set life…
Estonia was great, and Turku was fun as well. I hope to write more about all these places once I’m home.
Thanks for all my Finnish friends, new and old, for making this is a wonderful trip. Finncon rocks.
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Finncon is fini. Parris and I have just staggereed back to our hotel room from the dead reindeer party. The party is still going strong and we would love to have stayed longer… till sunset, at least… but we have to be up early tomorrow to catch a ferry to Estonia, where I’ll be doing a signing in Tallinn. Then the next day it’s back across the sea to Helsinki again, just long enough to set off for Turku, where I’ve got another signing.
Finncon was terrific. The warmth and hospitality we’ve found here has completely ruined my image of Finland as a frozen wasteland. Who knew? The sauna was fun too. And then there were all the cute anime girls in costume offering free hugs…
Thanks to all my Finnish friends. Now off to Estonia!
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So we’re here in Helsinki, me from Santa Fe and Phipps by way of Ireland. Grey skies and rain, but the people are warm and friendly. Yesterday we visited Sveaborg, the great island fortress that I’ve written two stories about. “Gibraltar of the North,” it was dubbed by John Quincy Adams. I can only conclude that JQA had never actually seen the Gibraltar of the south, since the resemblence between the two is nonexistent. Sveaborg is pretty cool in its own right, however, and I’m glad to have seen it.
The con proper starts tomorrow. Some come to Finncon if you can. It’s free!
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I am closing down book sales for a while, since I leave for Finland on July 5. Reopen in late July or August. If there’s a signed book you want, please wait till then.
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Just got word from the good folks at Valyrian Steel. They are now taking preorders for their full-size replica of Needle. (Arya not included).
To place an order or get more details, visit their website at http://www.valyriansteel.com/shop/swords/needle-sword-of-arya-stark/prod_3.html
And if you want be the first kid on your block to collect the complete armory, copies of Jon Snow’s Longclaw are still available as well.
Don’t be fooled by the pictures, the two swords are nowhere near the same size.
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I almost hate to say anything here, for fear of jinxing it… but for what it’s worth, the last six weeks or so have been the most productive period I’ve had on A DANCE WITH DRAGONS in… well… a year at least, maybe several. In the last three days I’ve completed three new chapters. Not from scratch, mind you, these were all chapters that had been partially written, and in some cases rewritten, for months if not years. But they’re finally done, and I’ve just reread them, and I’m almost convinced that they’re Not Crap.
We’ll see how I feel tomorrow.
Anyway, I know I don’t talk about DANCE frequently here, and that’s not going to change. Sorry, but I’m never going to be one of these writers who blogs daily about how many words they produced today. I don’t like to talk about the good days for fear of jinxing myself (all writers are superstitious at heart, just like baseball players), and I don’t like to talk about the bad days… well, just because. Writing is like sausage making in my view; you’ll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what’s gone into it.
But I am making a small exception now because… well, I’m feeling rather jazzed right now, and for the first time in a very long while, I think I can see a glimmering that might just be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Now if I can only slash through the Meereenese knot that I’ve been worrying at since 2005, I may actually start to get excited.
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For all you Wild Cards fans out there, I’ve changed the WC sample on my website, replacing the BUSTED FLUSH scene with a cool one from SUICIDE KINGS, written by Ian Tregillis (look for his his novel next year from Tor!) and featuring Rustbelt.
You can check it out at http://www.georgerrmartin.com/wc-s.html
SUICIDE KINGS will be published at the end of the year. This is the concluding volume of the Committee triad. Besides Ian T, the writers are Caroline Spector, Melinda M. Snodgrass, S.L. Farrell, Daniel Abraham, and Victor W. Milan. Featured viewpoint characters will be Rustbelt, the Amazing Bubbles, Double Helix, Gardener, Bugsy, and the Radical, but the rest of the gang will be on hand as well.
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