GRRM’s official site has been updated with the news that Dabel Brothers Production’s adaptation of "The Sworn Sword" is now scheduled for release in the coming months, and the addition of Blood of Dragons MUSH to the "Links" page. Furthermore, a new picture has been added to "From My Fans" and GRRM has begun selling copies of Meisha Merlin’s numbered limited edition of A Game of Thrones and Guardians of Order’s deluxe limited edition of the A Game of Thrones Roleplaying Game from his website, as noted in this post on "Not a Blog".
GRRM has recently posted about the final disposition of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” roleplaying game license held by the now-defunct Guardians of Order:
Over at his blog, Daniel Abraham has provided a brief remark on the status of the novel-length expansion of the "Shadow Twin" novella, written in collaboration with Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin:
Thanks to Sparks introducing a MySQL backend to chat, which made sure that channel and user data would be retained indefinitely, the Westeros.org chat has become much more functional. However, as many may have noticed, the login page was not working correctly for quite awhile, with all users being assigned a random name regardless of what nickname they put in.
Well, that problem has now been fixed as well! Feel free to drop by the new, improved Westeros.org Chat and say hi.
The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with reports from Boskone and the New York Comic Con, as well as a link to an interview with George at the latter event.
The History section has now been removed and the two articles that it held have been integrated into the FAQ, which in the future may end up having other essay-like answers to questions (both frequent and not so frequent ones) added.
The Concordance has finally been moved into ExpressionEngine. Old links to specific sections will no longer work, but it will now be easier to construct such links, as each section gets its very own URL. Additionally, it will be possible to see when each section was last updated. And yes, the AFfC update is finally in progress, so some sections have already had new material added.
At the New York Comic Con, Marvel Comics and Dabel Brothers Productions announced that Wild Cards, a seminal superhero setting created by and written about by authors such as George R. R. Martin, will see new life in comic book publishing through a brand new series which will be entirely original. Instead of adapting previous stories as the previous Epic series did years ago, the first six issues will feature the work of author Daniel Abraham (who has recently become a part of the Wild Cards team of writers, including writing the interstitials for Tor’s forthcoming new Wild Cards volume, Inside Straight). Daniel’s own announcement follows:
This message was sent to all current members of the webring, but as many of the emails bounced, we are posting it here as well in the hopes that it will reach a few of those people.
Due to the fact that RingSurf, the software that powers the webring, has no measures in place to prevent spam submissions, we have found that we are no longer able to make use of their services.
We are therefore forced to change how the webring works, and this means that everyone who wants to remain a part of the webring will need to update the ring code that they have on their webpage.
The way this will work is as follows:
1) Everyone who wants to remain a part of the webring should email us. Please make sure to include the name of your site in the email.
2) Two weeks from now, we will send out the new ringcode to everyone who has responded. The new ring will then start functioning side-by-side with the RingSurf ring.
3) Two weeks after that, the RingSurf ring will be deleted.
If anyone has any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would also like to note that we’d love to see more ring members as soon as the switch over has been completed, so if you have a site suitable for inclusion in the ring, do get in touch with us about being setup as a member.
An issue that has troubled us for awhile has involved the fact that when the server hosting Westeros.org-proper is down, this can lead to the server hosting the forums to act this is very slowly. This is due to the fact that some of the sidebar content—the latest news and the recommendations—is pulled from Westeros.org, and the attempt to complete the loading stops up the rest of the board until the connection finally times out. Previously, when this happened, we had to manually turn off the calls for the news and recommendations so that the rest of the board would act normally. Of course, this depended on our being aware of the problem and available.
After learning some elementary but new to us PHP, we believe we’ve worked out a way to prevent this from happening from now on. It may cause very minor delays in those cases where Westeros.org is out, but we’re talking a couple of seconds rather than minutes, so it’s a definite improvement.
Unfortunately, due to illness, George has had to cancel the pizza crawl in New Haven, Connecticut that he had been so looking forward to. See here for more information. The illness—either a bad case of a stomach virus or food poisoning—may impact his planned appearances at the New York Comic Con as well.
GRRM’s official site has been updated. The "Ice & Fire Update" notes that work continues on A Dance with Dragons, with some storylines going well and others will need rewriting before the book is done. George also discusses the fact that the updates have not exactly achieved what he hoped they would achieve in terms of reducing the flow of e-mails asking about the book, so he will no longer post any updates until he has completed the book. "From My Readers" also has more entries from fans. Finally, the "Books for Sale" section has been updated with the fact that GRRM has several copies of Meisha Merlin’s A Game of Thrones numbered limited edition for sale.
George has posted a final, detailed update on the plans for the pizza crawl in New Haven. If you’re interested in taking part, check the post out and add a comment regarding your intentions.
From the Dabel Brothers, we’ve received the latest press release notifying everyone of GRRM’s upcoming appearance at the New York Comic Con, which has been noted in the Calendar:
GRRM’s official site has been updated with new entries in "From my Readers" as well as the addition of the Dreamsongs covers in the "Cover Art" gallery.
We’ve upgraded from IPB 2.1.x to 2.2.1. This is a relatively major upgrade, including a host of changes both up front and behind the scenes. Unfortunately, these means that the skins the board uses are quite broken in some areas, to the point where the board is unusable until these skins are updated. The board will be down while these updates are being carried out. We have no estimate on how long this will take, but we’re working as quickly as possible.