From Martin’s website:

No. Sorry. Not done yet.

I’m close, though. Watch this space. When the book is done, you will read it here.

Meanwhile… there is news. Big news. The end is in sight, at long long last, and we’re close enough so that my editors and publishers at Bantam Spectra have set an actual publication date.

[…]

Yes, I know. You’ve all seen publication dates before: dates in 2007, 2008, 2009. None of those were ever hard dates, however. Most of them… well, call it wishful thinking, boundless optimism, cockeyed dreams, honest mistakes, whatever you like.

This date is different. This date is real.

Barring tsunamis, general strikes, world wars, or asteroid strikes, you will have the novel in your hands on July 12. I hope you like it.

(For what it’s worth, the book’s a monster. Think A STORM OF SWORDS.)

The dragons are coming. Prepare to dance.

And hey… thanks for waiting.

So. July 12th, 2011. That’s, like, just around the corner. Martin (and his publisher) seem very confident about his date. What do you think? Can we get honestly excited now?

Via The Mad Hatter’s Book Shelf & Book Review:

The Foul, Unnatural Murder of Gaelan Starfire & the Birth of Durzo Blint

“I got a bit of prophecy,” the old assassin said. “Not enough to be useful, you know. Just glimpses. My wife dead, things like that to keep me up late at night. I had this vision that I was going to be killed by forty men, all at once. But now that you’re here, I see they’re just you. Durzo Blint.”

Durzo Blint? Gaelan had never even heard the name.

***
Gaelan Starfire is a farmer now, happy to be a husband and a father; a careful, quiet, simple man. He’s also an immortal, peerless in the arts of war. Over the centuries, he’s worn many faces to hide his gift, but he is a man ill-fit for obscurity, and all too often he’s become a hero, his very names passing into legend: Acaelus Thorne, Yric the Black, Hrothan Steelbender, Tal Drakkan, Rebus Nimble.

But when Gaelan must take a job hunting down the world’s finest assassins for the beautiful courtesan-and-crimelord Gwinvere Kirena, what he finds may destroy everything he’s ever believed in.

I enjoyed The Black Prism well enough, but I’ve not read Weeks’ Night Angel Trilogy, but this prequel novella has me somewhat interested. More than anything, I like the idea that Orbit Books will be releasing an eBook edition of Perfect Shadow (an awful title, but whatever) both as a treat for fans of the series and as incentive for skeptics like me to give Weeks’ successful series a closer look. Plus, I’m a sucker for peerless-in-the-art-of-war-immortals-turned-farmer character archetypes.

Also, Weeks is an awesome interview.