Forgive the brevity of this. I am not feeling so well at the moment, and don’t have the energy for a long post.

I am going to have to cancel out on the pizza crawl.

I am still in Boston as I write, and may or may not be moving on to New Haven. Boskone was a lot of fun right up until last Sunday night, when I came down with . . . well, Parris thinks it’s a stomach virus, and I’m thinking it’s just plain old fashioned food poisoning. I blame a bad shrimp.

Whatever the cause, I’ve spent the last day and a half running between my bed and the bathroom. The worst is over, I think, but I’m still pretty weak, my stomach is very tender, and I seem to have lost my sense of smell. None of which bodes well for a day of eating pizza.

I am bitterly disappointed to have to post this. As sick as I felt yesterday, I have been hoping that by today I’d be back to my old self. I have been looking forward to this pizza crawl for weeks,

My sincere apologies to anyone who gets this message too late, and shows up in New Haven to meet me. If I could be there, I would be.

I still hope to have recovered in time to make all my scheduled appearances at the New York City comicon… but just now, nothing is certain.

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The pizza crawl is only a week away, so it is time we nailed down our plans.

So here’s how it is going to go (we hope).

Tuesday, February 20. We hit three of New Haven’s most famed pizzerias, to see if their pies are truly world class. We’ve learned that Sally’s, one of the city’s most famous joints, is closed for two weeks, taking them out of the running. Their loss. We still have plenty of great pizzerias to try out.

At 3:00 pm, we meet at FRANK PEPE’s on Wooster. Everyone says there will be a line. Okay. Those who are going, turn up and get in line. Parris and I will do the same. We could have anywhere from twenty to fifty people turning up for the crawl, so there’s no way we can all sit together, but we’ll make do. Parris will eat with one group, I’ll eat with another, we’ll both try and tablehop while we’re grabbing a few slices. If we have to wait an hour in line, we wait an hour in line and make friends there.

After we’re done at Pepe’s, we play it by ear, find someplace to hang out, have coffee and a drink or three.

At 6:00 pm, we adjourn across town to MODERN APIZZA for our second round of pies. Maybe there will be a line there as well, maybe there won’t. Same drill.

And for the true pizza lovers and the late night crowd, come 9:00 pm, we head over to BAR to try mashed potato pizza amongst “Alternative Lifestyle Night.” I’m told that BAR has private rooms upstairs. Maybe one of you locals can call them up and see about reserving one for us from 9pm until whenever. We’ll end the evening with some brews and pepperonis.

That’s the plan.

So… who’s coming? I know a lot of you responded on the last thread, but time passes, plans change, etc, so let’s hear from you again. And, if you can, please let us know whether you will be along for the whole crawl, or just for part of it… and if so, which part. That will help us figure out how many pizza crawlers to expect at each joint.

My thanks to all the locals who posted comments in the last thread, made phone calls, and helped put this together. You’ve all been great. We need one point man to coordinate all this, however, and it can’t be me, since I’ll be on the road as of Thursday… ergo, I hererby appoint ZEN BLADE, aka Dennis Mishler, as our semi-official Master of the Games for the Pizza Crawl. Zen Dennis (ZenDen?) was kind enough to post his contact number in his long message in the last thread. If you want to come and have questions, call him.

Zen Blade, I hope this is okay? And please, if you would, double check and make sure the plan as I have outlined it will actually work, and all these places will be open when they say they will, etc. If you can reserve that room for us at BAR, that would be great.

A few final comments. If you’re coming on the crawl, dress warmly and wear comfortable shoes. We may be walking, and there may be a lot of waiting in line.

It might be good if we had some way to recognize one another, since there will be lots of eager pizza eaters who aren’t part of the crawl. How, though? Ice & Fire t-shirts? No, too cold, the shirts will be hidden under jackets. Wear our baseball caps turned sideways?

Also, please, BRING CASH. We will have to pay for these pizzas, after all, and the pizzerias aren’t going to want to do separate checks for fifty, or handle twenty different people tossing in credit cards. Have some folding money so you can peel off your five bucks or ten bucks or whatever when the bill comes round.

And speaking of that bill… my experience with large groups is that things tend to go much better if everyone just pays an equal share. So if you’re one of these “oh, I didn’t have a coke, and I only had one slice, but he had two, so my share is two bucks less” people, be warned… that kind of stuff drives me buggy. My advice: order a coke and eat the second slice, and pay the same as everyone else. Nothing ruins a good evening more than spending an hour dividing up a check down to the last penny between fifty people.

Pepe’s! Modern! BAR! Who will be the best? Let’s see…

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It’s our last night in the city, and I’m typing this from our hotel room while Parris naps.

Tomorrow will be a long day. We’ll be headed home, but not until the evening, on Continental’s night flight out of Newark airport, the only direct flight from the NYC area to Albuquerque. Leaving that late in the day is a bit of a pain, but worth it, usually — not having to change planes shaves at least three hours off the travel time, and makes it less likely that we’ll miss a connection and wind up stranded at some hub somewhere. (The hub system is another of the crimes against humanity by the airlines). Even so, it will be a grueling day.

We’re both looking forward to getting home, however. Our annual midwinter visit to Boskone and New York City is normally a high point of our year, but this year’s version was more exhausting than usual. Nothing like a nice dose of norovirus to slow down all your fun. Neither of us is completely recovered even now. Just when you think it’s all over, you eat something you shouldn’t and your gut gives you a little reminder that no, it’s still feeling tender. I’ve been running at about 80% of my usual energy, and Phipps at no more than 50%. She had another bad bout last night and missed a wonderful dinner at Peter Lugar’s, the best steakhouse in the city.

We have had some fun, of course, but maybe only about half as much fun as we planned on having. NYC has so much to do that we always leave town regretting the stuff that we didn’t get around to doing, and this time we didn’t get around to even more than usual. Never got to a Broadway show or the IMAX theatre, never had a hot dog at Papaya King, no rides on the Staten Island ferry, never got over to Bayonne, never touched base with a bunch of our New York friends, etc. etc.

I did get to see my family, however, which was wonderful, and we also had a good time at the NYC Comicon, despite the crowds. We finally got to announce the new WILD CARDS comic series that we’ll be doing with DBPro and Marvel (to be scripted by Daniel Abraham), and we met the rest of the vast, charming, and very talented Dabel clan. Les and Ernst had some penciled pages and a cover on the SWORN SWORD comic as well, and it was great to get a look at that… and we touched base with some wonderful artists who may be doing covers for us in the future.

Well, Parris is stirring, so I’ll post now and see if she’s feeling well enough for dinner. More later, or maybe when we get home.

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Our annual winter trip to Boskone and New York City is coming steadily closer, and with it the soon-to-be-infamous pizza crawl in New Haven. Time to get organized.

My last post about this (two down, under the HBO news) drew a lot of comments. Others responded by private email. Sounds as though lots of folks want to be a part of our crawl, and try the famous slices of New Haven.

How many, though? I’m not sure. Some of those responding were interested but indefinite. Others said, “I’m in,” but they were posting anonymously, so I have no idea WHO is “in.” Others used their Live Journal handles and avatars… which is better than Anonymous, but in many cases I still don’t know who you are. Please, guys and gals, use your names, at least for this. Otherwise we may end up with twenty people standing outside of Pepe’s waiting for Billy the Mountain, none of them realizing that Billy the Mountain is really that quiet guy called Fred who turned up twenty minutes ago.

We do need to get a better notion of whether there are going to be ten of us, twenty, fifty, or a hundred (too many, I fear, and we may have logistical problems).

We could also use a volunteer on location in New Haven to help coordinate all this, someone to double check that all the pizza places are open, make reservations where reservations are accepted, and generally get our ducks in a row.

So let’s make it official now. Who’s in? Not maybe, or I’d love to, or I’d-be-in-except-I-live-in-Istanbul, but definitely going-to-be-there-on-February-20 in. And is there anyone there local who can take charge of organizing some of this?

I’ll start. Parris and I are in. That’s 2.

Oh, and please… only pizza crawl comments on this thread. If you want to talk about the HBO deal, go down to my previous post and comment there. I want this particular discussion to stay focused, thank you very much.

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Yes, it’s true.

Yes, this is the Big News that I have been hinting at.

No, the Big News was not the pizza crawl, or the delivery of the new WILD CARDS book, though of course I’m excited about those as well.

VARIETY broke the story this morning. Instead of rehashing what they said, let me just point all of you toward:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117957532.html?categoryid=14&cs=1

I’ve already gotten close to a hundred emails this morning, just off the VARIETY article. I expect that number will have swollen to several hundred before the day is out. I appreciate all the good wishes and congratulations, but I am NOT going to be able to respond to all of you individually.

I will be making my own announcement on my news page, of course, and that may answer some of your questions, but I haven’t actually written it yet, so please be patient.

I appreciate all the casting suggestions too, but guys, you’re getting way way WAY ahead of yourselves. Developing a television series is a long and time-consuming process, and we’re just getting started here. We only closed the deal a couple of days ago.

I will do my best to keep everyone informed as the project progresses, but this is not something you will be telling TIVO to record next week.

This might be a great time to subscribe to HBO, however. Regardless of what happens with A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, HBO still has the best shows on television, shows like DEADWOOD, THE WIRE, and THE SOPRANOS that stand head and shoulders above anything on the networks. The second season of ROME just started last Sunday, and it’s fabulous; the look of it, the writing, the directing, the acting, all of it is first rate. That’s why I have been saying for years that HBO was the perfect place for A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE.

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Now, this journal entry is mostly intended for readers from Connecticut. If you’re not from Connecticut, there’s probably not going to be a lot here to interest you, so go and talk amongst yourselves.

A few posts back, I wondered whether or not I had any fans in New Haven. Turns out I do. Some of them spoke up in replies to that LJ entry, and others sent me email. Here’s why I asked —

Next month Parris and I will be making our annual visit to Boston for Boskone (a great convention, I urge you all to attend). After the con, we’ll be making our annual post-Boskone visit to New York City. We usually take the train down from Boston to NYC’s Penn Station (soon to be renamed Moynihan Station, I hope, in honor of Parris’s Uncle Pat), and that’s what we plan to do this year… but this year, we’re planning on getting off at New Haven on the way, to try out the pizza.

Some of you may have read my “What I’m Reading” page, and may remember my 2005 review of Ed Levine’s book about pizza, A SLICE OF HEAVEN. If so, you’ll know that I am a huge fan of classic NYC style thin crust pizza pie (“real pizza,” I call it, and don’t talk to me about that Chicago deep-dish tomato and bread casserole thing). Well, Levine’s book claims that the best pizza in the world comes from New Haven. Since that time, I’ve also seen a special on the Food Channel that makes the same claim. Two specific places are mentioned — Frank Pepe’s and Sally’s.

OK. Out here in New Mexico, I live thousands of miles from great pizza (some of the local pies are adequate, but that’s all, and they don’t even call ’em “pies,” which is a dead clue that the pizza is going to be second rate). I can’t stand the thought of riding right past what may be the best pizza places in the world without trying. Ergo…

You’ve all heard of pub crawls. Well, I’m up for a pizza crawl. I want to try BOTH of these famous pizza places, and see how their pie stacks up. And maybe some place called Modern too. I see from my webcrawling that there are some New Havenites who rate that one even higher than Sally’s and Frank Pepe’s.

So here’s the plan. Parris and I leave leave Boston by train on Tuesday, February 20. It will only take us a few hours to New Haven. We’ll check into a hotel, stay overnight, and check out a few slices before departing again for NYC on Wednesday, February 21.

If any of my Connecticut readers want to join us for a slice or three… hey, the more the merrier, I always say. Some local guides would be most welcome… and who knows? If the pizza is as good as advertised, I might even be convinced to make a few knights…

So speak up, New Haven! Who’s game for a pizza crawl?

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Here’s a suggestion for all those complaining about my football posts — DON’T READ THEM.

That’s what I do, when I visit the Live Journal of one of my Friends and discover that the latest post concerns something that doesn’t interest me. I don’t feel the need to add a comment berating them just because their interests are not my interests.

This is my Not A Blog, and I’ll post about whatever the hell I want, thank you.

This past weekend was two solid days of NFL football, the divisional round of the playoffs. With both the Giants and the Jets eliminated, I no longer had a strong rooting interest, but I’m enough of a football fan so that I still watched all four games. (And I do like some teams better than others, so I usually found someone to pull for, or against). Chris Berman and Tom Jackson at ESPN like to say this is the best weekend of the year for an NFL fan, and I think they’re on to something… all four games were tense and exciting, with the verdicts in doubt right down to the end, and there were plenty of terrific plays and memorable moments. My congratulations to the winning teams and their fans, and my condolences to the losers. You can join us Giants and Jets fans in a chorus of, “Wait till next year.”

The biggest postgame controversy came out of the Patriots – Chargers game, where some of the Patriots celebrated their upset victory by dancing on the Chargers logo at midfield, making choking motions, and mocking the sack dance of Charger defensive star Shawn “Lights Out” Merriman. Needless to say, all this public gloating and taunting upset some of the Chargers and their fans, and led to bad feelings and harsh words afterwards. I can understand why. Rubbing salt in the wound, especially when the wound is fresh and raw, is pretty classless. If it had been one of my teams that had lost and was being mocked, I would have been pretty honked off too… and, indeed, during the season, it did anger me whenever I saw a member of an opposing team mocking the Giants’ “ballin'” celebratory lay-up shot gesture after doing something against the Giants (a sack, a TD, whatever).

I really wish the NFL would have the guts to put an end to all these goddamned dances and celebrations and other nonsense. They add nothing to the game, in my opinion. There are rules against “taunting,” yes, but they are narrowly defined and selectively enforced. The league should go much further.

It was one of my own who started all this, I know — Mark Gastineau, a pass rusher for the New York Jets in the 1980s, was the first guy to become famous for a “sack dance.” Early on, I think, it was just an expression of Gastineau’s natural exuberence at making a sack, but when the cameras started focusing on it and commentators started commenting, Gastineau made it his trademark… until the NFL outlawed it. The “Gastineau Rule,” as they called it, defined Mark’s sack dance as taunting and made it subject to a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. As a Jets fan, I will admit, I did not like the rule (maybe because Gastineau was never the same after they prohibited his dance). These days, however, I find myself wondering what the hell ever happened to the Gastineau Rule, and why it is no longer enforced. We need it now more than we ever did in the 80s. These days, gloating, taunting, and bad sportsmanship have become so common that no one even seems to see them any longer.

Plenty of that was on display this weekend. The postgame celebrations of the Patriots were the most flagrant examples, yes… but you know, mocking Shawn Merriman’s “Lights Out” dance is only marginally more offensive than Shawn Merriman’s “Lights Out” dance itself. They both have the same purpose — to rub the other guy’s nose in it.

Every time the NFL tries to crack down on this crap, some idiot sportswriters and TV commentators are sure to start making noises about how that makes ’em the “No Fun League.” Says who? None of this stuff is fun as far as I’m concerned. Not even when it’s my own team. When Michael Strahan makes a sack, it’s the sack itself that I enjoy, not the phantom basketball shot afterward. When one of my teams scores a touchdown, it’s the play that excites me, not some silly dance that the receiver does in the end zone. If I wanted to see dancing, I’d go to the goddamned ballet.

I say, outlaw all of it. The sack dances, the end zone celebrations, the receivers who signal “first down” when catching a ball for a first down (that’s a job for the zebras), the receivers who mime throwing a flag when they think they have been interfered with (never works anyway). Fifteen yards unsportsmanlike conduct for all of it, I say.

The networks could help put an end to all the stuff as well, if they would only stop putting it on camera. When the networks stopped showing the drunken fans running across the field being pursued by security, the drunks stopped running across the field. They should do the same for the TOs and Shawn Merrimans and… yes… Michael Strahans of the league. Show their touchdowns and their sacks, and then CUT AWAY as they go into their chicken dances and “look at me” celebrations, and let us get back to football. That’s what we came for.

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The Giants did not fire Tom Coughlin. Instead they gave him a one-year extension, to ensure “stability” and prevent him from being a lame duck.

Sigh. Personally, if “stability” means collapsing after a 5-2 start, as Coughlin’s teams have done three years in a row, I vote for unstable.

I hope Tom will at least have the sense to make some staff changes, and the courage to declare an open competition for starting QB next year in training camp.

On other fronts… there has been some exciting news this week, but I can’t talk about it yet. Do keep an eye on my news page, however. Big announcement coming soon.

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The good news is, I finally managed to recover my emails and bookmarks. The “how” of it is long and boring, so I won’t go into that. Suffice it to say that while the various fixes suggested by the AOL customer service people in India did not work, I did kinda sorta grasp what they were trying to do, and a couple of days later I finally located a backup file and was able to move it to where it needed to be, and… voila!… I had a filing cabinet and bunch of favorite places again.

It is sort of a Pyrrhic victory, however. The rub here is that the most recent usable backup I was able to find dates from Thanksgiving 2005. So now all I have lost is the last year’s worth of emails… which, of course, contained almost everything that was important. Much of the older mail is no doubt very stale by now… but all the same, there are a few letters in there that I really regret having lost, and I’m glad to have them back.

Anyway, it has been a sobering experience, and I remain resolved to change the way I handle these things. For starts, I am going to clean out all these thousands of unanswered fan mails. Let’s face it, if the letter has been sitting in my queue since 2001 and I haven’t gotten around to giving it the thoughtful, substantive answer it deserved, I will probably never get around to it. I’m going to draft a very simple form reply, send it out to everyone, and clean my inbox. So if you wrote me back four years ago and have been holding your breath ever since… hey, you may get to exhale soon.

At least my bookmarks are back. They hadn’t changed much during the past year, so my losses there were minimal.

I appreciate all the suggestions about other email services I might use, and I likely will make some sort of switch in the near future. The problem is, there are so many suggestions that sorting out which one would actually suit me best would be cumbersome. For all its problems, I have come to appreciate the simplicity of AOL. I do not have the time, the energy, or the expertise to deal with a lot of computer stuff.

Oh, and yes, thanks to everyone who sent condolences on the results of the Jets and Giants games this past weekend. Despite what one might conclude from the scores, I thought the Jets played much better than the Giants did. The Jets hung in there for three quarters with a much more talented opponent, and only truly started to fall apart after that freak lateral. The Giants just proved again that they are talented but undisciplined. The defense stuffed the Eagles three-and-out three times in the first quarter, and three times the G-Men got the ball at midfield… and failed to get a point. Tiki ran brilliantly, of course, and Shockey played like the mad berserker that he is, but the rest of the team…. no, I’m not convinced, and I still want Tom Coughlin fired.

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Well, I spent several hours on the phone yesterday, talking with my local computer guru, my Australian computer guru, and two different service consultants at AOL (from India or Bangladesh would be my guess, judging from their accents). We tried many different things, some several times, but in the end nothing worked. My emails and bookmarks are still gone. It is now starting to look pretty certain that they are lost for good, although there are a few last-ditch things I want to try before I give up completely.

In a way this is a sort of liberation, as I said in my last post here… but it still has me bummed out. Every time I think I have started to put it behind me, I remember another particular bit of email — incoming, out-going, or waiting to be finished — that is now lost to me, and I get morose all over again. It’s a rotten way to start the year.

I am doing a lot of thinking, however. I have to make some serious changes in the ways I handle email. As traumatic as this loss has been, it was ridiculous that I ever allowed myself to get into a position where I HAD more than three thousand unanswered emails in my filing cabinet. Some of them dated as far back as 1998 (the last time AOL treated me to one of these crashes, and wiped out my files). I kept them because, well… many of them were long, thoughtful, moving emails from my readers than I felt deserved replies, and I kept telling myself that one day I would reply to them, but then…

The problem did not occur overnight, of course. There must have been a time in 1998 when I had only ten unanswered emails. And that night I answered five of them, and the next day ten new ones came in, and… well, I did my best to keep up, by fits and starts, but I could never quite do it, even when I resorted to half a dozen different form letters, so over the years I just started falling further and further behind. At one point in 2004, I recall, the number had climbed to over 2500, and I got alarmed and girded up my loins (painful, that) and by hook and by crook got it down under 1600 in less than a month. Then I went away on a trip, and by the time I came back it was over 2500 again.

Of course, I shouldn’t give the impression that all of the mails I lost were fan letters. Far from it. I also had personal correspondence in there, hobby stuff, and lots and lots of business emails. I need a better way to handle those as well.

Right now the thing is too fresh and I don’t know what I am going to do, but I do feel that I have to make changes. If nothing else, the psychological pressure of an ever-increasing amount of accumulating email is enormous… even on nights where I answered fifty letters, I would go away feeling guilty because I knew damn well that another month would pass before I found the energy to answer the next fifty, and during that month I’d fall another three or four hundred emails behind.

There were times early in my career when it felt as if I was publishing my books only to check them down a well. Months and years would pass without me getting a single fan letter of any sort. Maybe it’s the memory of those days that has made me so appreciative of all the readers who have taken the time to write me about my books.

Even so, I can’t go on the way that I was going.

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