George R.R. Martin's Blog, page 24

The Jokers Are Coming, the Jokers Are Going

Hey, Wild Cards fans… the moon is rising in July.

The JOKER MOON, that is.   The latest Wild Cards mosaic novel, volume thirty in the overall series (but you don’t need to read the first twenty-nine to enjoy it,  I promise).

Theodorus was a dreamer.   As a child, he dreamt of airplanes, rockets, and outer space. When the  wild card virus transformed him into a monstrous snail centaur weighing several tons, his boyhood  dreams seemed out of reach, but a Witherspoon is not so easily defeated.

Year...

Violence in Turkey

My dear friend Sibel Kekilli — Shae, for all you fans of HBO’s GAME OF THRONES — emailed me recently to alert me to some distressing news out of Turkey.   (Sibel is German, born and raised in Germany, but of Turkish descent).    Turkey, under the Erdogan regime, has officially withdrawn from the Istanbul convention that combats violence against women.

Here are the details:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/20/europe/turkey-convention-violence-women-intl/index.html

Sibel herself has first hand knowl...

Role Playing for Stagecoach

Words For Our Times

We’ve Been Working on the Railroad

The Santa Fe Southern, that is!

The defunct railroad we bought had only one working locomotive,  number 7.   So one of our first orders of business was to get old number 93 rolling again.   She needed a new engine.

Thanks to John Howell and Daniel Dornbach and their crack team of railroaders, that’s now DONE.

 

Horror in New Hampshire

For all you fans and aspiring writers of Lovecraftian cosmic horror… the Odyssey Writer’s Workshop in New Hampshire is open for applicants for their 2021 conference, and financial aid is available from a variety of sources, including my own Miskatonic Scholarship.

Here’s the official announcement:

 Publicity Release Writing Workshops Charitable Trust 

 P.O. Box 75, Mont Vernon, NH 03057 ◘ Phone/Fax (603) 673-6234 ◘ www.odysseyworkshop.org 

 Publicity Release 

February 2021 

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN ...

Coming… Eventually… Maybe

The story about the adaptation of IN THE LOST LANDS broke a week or so back.

And now, hard on the heels of that, comes the announcement  about another story of mine being developed as a movie.

“Sandkings” was the story I was best known for, before A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE came along.   Originally published in OMNI, it went on to win the Hugo,  Nebula, and Locus Awards (my only triple crown), and has been anthologized and reprinted more times than I can count.   It was filmed once before as well, a...

Good News and Bad

I got the first shot of Covid vaccine last week, I am relieved to report.  The Moderna vaccine.   Second shot scheduled for the end of the month.

Parris has also gotten her first shot.

That’s the good news.

And it does seem that we are finally turning the corner on the pandemic.      We are not out of the woods yet, but I am cautiously hopeful.

The bad news, of course, is that I have lost five friends since November.   Not all to Covid, though that was a factor in some of the deaths.   Death is ...

Covid Claims Another Friend

The Grim Reaper just keeps on reaping, sad to say.

I have lost another friend.   Last night I got a phone call from Michael Cassutt in LA to tell me that our mutual friend Dr. Michael Engelberg had died.   He was a victim of Covid-19, one of the half million we have lost.

Dr. Michael was a physician himself, an oncologist at Cedar-Sinai in Los Angeles, and one of the leaders in his field, though he retired from active practice a few years ago.    Thankfully (knock wood) neither I nor anyone in m...

Gray Alys on the Silver Screen

I cannot seem to keep out of the news these days.

The latest story to break:

https://ew.com/movies/milla-jovovich-paul-w-s-anderson-in-the-lost-lands-dave-bautist a/   

“In the Lost Lands” was one of my earliest fantasy stories (most of my work in the 70s was science fiction), the first tale of the mysterious Gray Alys, an enigmatic sorceress who would sell you anything you might desire… though her customers soon learned that you buy from her at your peril.   No doubt my long-time fans all recall...