George R.R. Martin's Blog, page 241

Mostly I collect knights and medieval miniatures, sure, but I'm a science fiction fan and writer too, and every so often I see a space toy I can't resist.

If any of you are fans of the old 1953 George Pal version of WAR OF THE WORLDS, Pegasus has just released a marvelous model of the Martian war machines, available in both kit and finished form. I picked up two of the finished models from Michigan Toy Soldier, and they're really seriously stunning, boys and girls.



I know, Pal's floating manta r

Okay, you got me.

Some of you, anyway.

Howard is a swell writer and all, but he's even slower than me. (By the way, all that stuff about the Wanderer and the Chronicles of Chim-Wazle is true).

Guess I'll just have to finish Dancing by myself.

See you again next April, boys and girls. Bya, bya, bya.

Hiya, kids, hiya, hiya, hiya.

I have some good news for all of you who have been waiting for A DANCE WITH DRAGONS.

It's no secret that I've struggled with this one, that the writing has been going slowly, that I've missed several deadlines. Meanwhile, I've delivered several Wild Cards books (ably assisted by Melinda M. Snodgrass) and co-edited a couple of major original anthologies with Gardner Dozois. And then there was HUNTER'S RUN, the three-way novel that I did with Dozois and Daniel Abraham

So the other shoe has finally dropped in Denver, and it's now official: quarterback Jay Cutler is available for trade. No big surprise. Everybody but the Broncos has seemed to know that Cutler and Denver were done a month ago.

That decision to fire Mike Shanahan is looking worse and worse.

Big question from my end is whether the Jets should go after Cutler, now that he's officially on the market. I admit to having mixed feelings about that.

With the NFL draft only a month away, all the draft gur

Just a few days left in March. When the month ends, so does our foreign edition sale, so if you want $5 off the foreign translations of any of my books, this is the time to act.

I really don't know where the time goes. It seems like yesterday I was watching the Superbowl, and a few days before that I was just getting back from Spain and Portugal. The days and weeks and months seem to go by so quickly now... and the pages come so slowly...

Speaking of Spain and Portugal, I meant to post a lot mo

It's that time of year again, and Ty and I have spent two days pulling together all my tax records for my accountant.

Help, help, I'm drowning in little bits of paper!!!

How I hate this time of year.

(It's snowing, too).

Make it a Wild Cards Xmas this year.

Tor informs me that SUICIDE KINGS has been scheduled for release in December.



So this year, stuff Rustbelt, Gardener, Double Helix, the Amazing Bubbles, Jonathan Hive, and the Radical in your stocking.

Gardner Dozois and I have completed work on our WARRIORS anthology, and delivered it to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, our editor at Tor

This one is a monster, a gigantic "event" anthology with an all-star lineup of writers, most of them award winners and bestsellers in their own fields. The theme of the anthology is war and the warrior ethos... but what makes WARRIORS different from all the military SF anthologies that have gone before is that this one is a cross-genre anthology. Fantasy, SF, historic

Well, this year's Hugo Award nominations are in. You can check out the full list at:

http://anticipationsf.ca/English/Hugos

For several years now I have been beating the drum on this blog and elsewhere, urging more people to nominate.

The good news is, nominations are up sharply this year. Denvention III received 483 valid nominating ballots, Anticipation has announced 799. That's a very impressive spike.

The bad news is, well, almost none of the stuff that I nominated made the ballot, and I'm

I can't resist sharing some more beautifully painted miniatures.

Here's another set of the Lannister twins. These two were painted for me by the exquisitely talented Jen Haley of Paintrix Miniatures, whose website can be found at http://www.paintrix-miniatures.com/ First up is Jaime, this time in crimson Lannister plate, wearing the black silk cape he wore the first time we see him, at Winterfell in A GAME OF THRONES.






The facial details are just amazing, I think. I used to try my own hand at pa