Not a Blog

On the Road Again

May 18, 2011 at 4:14 pm
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… the life I love is signing books for my readers. (Actually, I kind of do, though of late the crowds have been so big that I get pretty weary by the end).

Anyway, just got the second half of the schedule for my DANCE WITH DRAGONS book tour from Bantam. The tour will begin with Boston, New York City, and Indianapolis, as detailed in my post of May 7, which you’ll find somewhere downriver.

Then I’m off to the San Diego Comicon for a week.

After comicon, I will be appearing at:

Tuesday, July 26
7:00pm
Barnes & Noble
189 The Grove Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Wednesday, July 27
7:00pm
Fox Theatre
2215 Broadway Street
Redwood City, CA 94063
http://www.foxrwc.com/
*event hosted by Kepler’s

Friday, July 29
7:30pm
Town Hall
1119 8th Ave
Seattle, WA 98101
http://www.townhallseattle.org/index.cfm
*event hosted by University Bookstore

Sunday, July 31
2:00pm
Tattered Cover LoDo
1628 16th Street
Denver, CO 80202

Probably one more stop to be added after that

More details on the signings will be posted here as we get closer to the dates.

Again, though, let me say… if you actually want to meet me and hang and talk some, the place to do that is at a convention. Book signings are great, but in recent years my crowds have been huge, which means each person in the queue gets like twenty seconds. I don’t like that part of it… I’d much rather have the time to chat with my readers… but you have to keep the line moving. Anything else is unfair to the people further back.

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You Asked For It

March 24, 2011 at 8:08 pm
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And so did I, for that matter.

Good news for all you audiofans out there.

Bantam has informed me that world record holder Roy Dotrice has been signed to read the audiobook of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. Schedules are being set even as I type.

Roy has always been my first choice as reader, and always will be. He did a great job with the first three books in the series, setting that world record along the way, and I know he will delight us all with DANCE as well.

And it's in no small part thanks to all of you. After FEAST came out, I received hundreds of emails wanting to know why Roy was not the reader and demanding his return. So now he's back.

We aim to please.

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Sample, Sample

August 11, 2010 at 11:45 am
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All of you Wild Cards fans out there should check out my website. Seeing as SUICIDE KINGS has been out for half a year, I finally got around to taking down the SK excerpt in my “Wild Cards Sample” page, and replacing it with a sample from the new book, FORT FREAK.

The new sample is by the enormously talented Cherie Priest; the first section from “Rat Race,” her interstitial story, featuring her joker detective, Leo “Ramshead” Storgman.

FORT FREAK is the twenty-first volume in the Wild Cards series. Tor will be bringing the book out in hardcover in June, 2011. Along with Cherie’s tale of Ramshead’s final months in the 5th precinct, stories by Melinda M. Snodgrass, John Jos. Miller, Victor Milan, Ty Franck, Paul Cornell, David Anthony Durham, Stephen Leigh, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Kevin Andrew Murphy will also be featured. Old favorites like the Oddity, Father Squid, Dorian Wilde, Charles Dutton, Tienyu, and the Sleeper will be on hand, and you’ll be meeting some great new jokers, aces, and deuces, including Tinkerbill, the Rook, Ratboy and Flipper, Abigail, Natya, SlimJim, the Magpie, Tabby, Beastie Bester, the Button Man, Maggie Graves, Sgt Squinch, Gordon the Ghoul, and the Infamous Black Tongue.

And as long as I was swapping out samples, I rotated the excerpt on the Ice & Fire sample page as well, replacing the first Tyrion chapter from DANCE with the first Jon Snow.

Enjoy the reads.

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Dancing

August 7, 2010 at 4:38 pm
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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 4, 2010 at 12:06 am
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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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Dancing

August 1, 2010 at 6:58 pm
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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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Dancing

July 31, 2010 at 1:22 pm
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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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A Few Odds, Some Ends

July 30, 2010 at 8:02 pm
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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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The Only Living Boy in New York

July 25, 2010 at 8:08 pm
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… or Santa Fe, as the case may be.

Half the editors I know have spent the weekend at comicon in San Diego, hobnobbing with many writers I know, attending fabuloous parties, enjoying great meals, and drinking in bizarre but fascinating human tapestry that is SDCC.

Tomorrow, off in Belfast, the cameras begin to roll on the HBO series. Northern Ireland is way ahead of us, so it’s tomorrow there already. Only a few hours now.

And here I sit at my computer, still shoveling Snow. And snow. The snow won’t stop. The squids don’t like it much.

sigh

I’m missing all the fun, just to make more fun for you guys.

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Snowbound

July 21, 2010 at 10:44 am
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Falling way behind here on LiveJournal, I know. I’ve got lots more parts and actors to talk about, the RTS game to announce, the Eenie Awards….

Snowing heavily in Santa Fe, however, and I’ve been on a bit of a roll. I’ll get to all that other stuff when I can. Kong comes first.

Pat’s just died. A quick death, but a messy one. Ugly, painful, humiliating. But hey, he earned it.

Off I go to shovel Snow.

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