Westeros

Word is that the semifinalist ballot for the Origin Awards has been leaked. Each category will be narrowed down to five finalists. In the “Miniatures or Miniature Line” category, Dark Sword Miniatures and the George R. R. Martin Masterworks series sculpted by Tom Meier are on the list. The finalists should be announced soon.

A few more posts from the Center Stage event, as GRRM has snuck in a few last responses before officially closing out his participation. Of particular interest are his remarks on future books he might write in the setting, and a number of questions concerning Targaryen historical matters.

For those using Firefox, we’ve now introduced OpenSearch plugins to all areas of Westeros.org. There are three primary ones: the main search plugin searches sites such as The Citadel, while the forum and the wiki have dedicated plugins. Just check your search bar and you should see the option of adding our search plugins to your collection. What this will allow you to do is quickly and easily search the site, forum, and wiki from anywhere on the Internet.

A massive update to the So Spake Martin collection today, including GRRM’s posts to the Barnes & Noble Bookclub event. The event appears to have been the most popular of the B&N Center Stage events, drawing nearly 300 total posts across four topics, with GRRM posting answers more than fifty times (and often providing answers to multiple questions in those posts); the next largest, by Anne Rice, appears to have drawn slightly fewer than 200.

For those fans of The Hedge Knight and The Sworn Sword, the Dabel Brothers will be putting in an appearance at the New York ComicCon. More details of their panel, including some of the topics it’ll cover and an opportunity to get a free preview of their forthcoming Dresden Files comic can be found here.

GRRM’s official site has been updated with several new posts in “Not a Blog”, discussing among other things his big push to try and finish A Dance with Dragons by the end of June, the new Wild Cards comic, and his participation in Barnes & Noble’s Center Stage forum.

Barnes & Noble has invited GRRM to take part in their “Center Stage” on-line forum, where users can pose questions to the author and talk among themselves at the same time. He will answer select questions each day, over the course of the five day event. More information can be found here. The event will have a special emphasis on Wild Cards: Inside Straight, but his other works can be discussed, as well as his work in television. The forum goes live on Monday, April 14th and continues through to the 18th, but users may already start to discuss and pose questions here. Registration is required.

Though due to hit comic shop shelves on the 9th of April, there’s a new preview available of Wild Cards: The Hard Call #1 from Dabel Brothers Productions. It’s an all-original Wild Cards comic story, something which has never been done before, featuring the talents of Hugo-nominated author Daniel Abraham and artist Eric Battle.

We have completed one of our periodic checks of the links in the So Spake Martin collection, generally found in the “Chats, Interviews, Etc.” section. Dead links have been replaced with active ones (often thanks to the Internet Archive). There’s some great material in there, for those who’ve never perused them before. Of particular note are chats such as those hosted by Opus Press and Dromen and Demonen. One interview is currently dead, a 1996 interview with Amazon.com. We will be contacting them requesting permission to host it ourselves.

The undisputed master of “A Song of Ice and Fire” portraiture, Amok (aka Roman Papsuev), has a new official site, including his whole gallery of “A Song of Ice and Fire” images created both as a fan and professionally, as well as a great amount of other art from other projects he is involved in. Sharp-eyed fans may notice that he’s touched up some of the portraits while in the process of getting the new site up. Expect to see some more fantastic art there in the future!

Subterranean Press has announced that they will be publishing a book in the tradition of the old Ace Doubles, namely putting together two stories in one volume. In this case, they’ve announced the double-volume will feature reprints of two novellas by George R. R. Martin. The book will be titled after the two novellas it contains, Starlady and Fast-Friend.

The stories date from the mid-70’s and seem to fall within the scope of GRRM’s “Thousand Worlds” setting. The book, which will be published both as a limited edition of 200 and as a regular trade, will feature a cover by Martina Pilcerova.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with two reports from Technicon 25. In it, George R. R. Martin’s progress on A Dance with Dragons and the third “Dunk & Egg” story are discussed.

Also, a spoiler-filled report concerning a chapter from Dance that GRRM read, and ensuing discussion and elaborations, can be found at the “A Song of Ice and Forum”, here.

For no reason currently known to us, the forum is unavailable. Some other services are also down—the IRC chan and nickservs, FTP—which suggest that the server itself may be knocked offline (possibly due to an upstream router issue). More news when we have it.

George R. R. Martin and his partner Parris have placed a number of interesting items up on Ebay in support of the Match it for Pratchett fund, an attempt to match Terry Pratchett’s £500,000 donation towards Alzheimer’s research following his announcement that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Among the auctioned items is a limited illustration of Fevre Dream, the A Game of Thrones Deluxe RPG, autographed copies of The Ice Dragon and Wild Cards: Inside Straight, and galley proofs of Pratchett works such as Good Omens (written in collaboration with Neil Gaiman) and Only You Can Save Mankind.