[Note: This report is pieced together from several posts by the reporter. It has been slightly edited.]
I did leave a bit early to get a spot in the George R.R. Martin reading. Which I did. Good thing I did because there was a very long line to get into the room, and I am not sure everyone made it in - and it was one of the larger rooms.
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He read a chapter about Arya, and it was very moving, and well done. It was the first AFfC reading I have been to, I have no idea what chapter it was. He did say that after a reading he is giving in Seattle next week, he isn't going to read anymore new material from the book. He said it was getting to the point where what he was reading to the audiences was just a little behind what he was writing. I think he was also worried about reading the whole book before it was published, negating the need to purchase the book - though he didn't say that. After Seattle he said he would start to re-read chapters that he has already read. He also said he hoped not to be reading from AFfC next year. He wants to do Dance of Dragons next (it was supposed to be #2, then #3, then #4, and now hopefully #5).
He said several things about the book:
He is hoping it will not be as long as the last one - which caused technical problems for publishers in other parts of the world (they had to split it in 2 because of the size). However he said he won't just get to say page 1300 and say "To Be Continued" -- the book has to have an end even though it is part of a larger story arc. He is afraid though that if it is too large his publishers will refuse to publish it (not sure if thats really true or not).
Some of his problems have come because he has introduced new POV characters, and he really likes them. So he has more story to tell. At one point he was going to do a one chapter prolog that incorporated stuff from Dorne, and stuff from the Iron Isles. That became 2 chapters, then 12 (7 for one and 5 for the other). He realized he couldn't have a 250 page prolog that was all about characters that we have never met before, so he had to rip it up and start over. He wove the material in the prolog into the rest of the book. He is also finding that in some places where he was going to have a 5 year gap in when we see a character - that what the character does and learns in those 5 years was too interesting and important to skip over. So the story has grown bigger. The chapter he read today was somthing that he originally planned to skip over and then decided not to.
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Gaiman won the short story award and had nothing prepared to say, but his didn't say f*ck again. George R. R. Martin presented the award and said he took credit for Gaiman's carreer. Seems he once pitched Martin this story about a character called The Sandman for Martin's anthology series Wild Cards and he rejected it, which led Gaiman to get it published elsewhere and the rest is history. Gaiman said he didn't know what to do with the award - since he was on stage all night, and Martin offered to take it. It ended up on the floor next to the podium.