Posts Tagged: George R.R. Martin

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An Aside | New GAME OF THRONES Season 2 Trailer: SHADOW

By Aidan Moher January 29th, 2012

 

The very first YouTube comment more-or-less sums up my thoughts:

I’m watching this in the nude. & yes, I’m very excited :}

More to the point, though you don’t seem him in many frames, the trailer is clearly centered around Tyrion (who’s also, in my opinion, the lynchpin of the novel). Peter Dinklage has risen to great heights on the back of that small man, Tyrion Lannister, and it will be fun to watch him climb yet higher with his performance in the second season of Game of Thrones. Great stuff.

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Free Readin’ | THE WINDS OF WINTER by George R.R. Martin

By Aidan Moher December 29th, 2011
THE WINDS OF WINTER by George R.R. Martin

The king’s voice was choked with anger. “You are a worse pirate than Salladhor Saan.”

Theon Greyjoy opened his eyes. His shoulders were on fire and he could not move his hands. For half a heartbeat he feared he was back in his old cell under the Dreadfort, that the jumble of memories inside his head was no more than the residue of some fever dream. I was asleep, he realized. That, or passed out from the pain. When he tried to move, he swung from side to side, his back scraping against stone. He was hanging from a wall inside a tower, his wrists chained to a pair of rusted iron rings.

The air reeked of burning peat. The floor was hard-packed dirt. Wooden steps spiraled up inside the walls to the roof. He saw no windows. The tower was dank, dark, and comfortless, its only furnishings a high-backed chair and a scarred table resting on three trestles. No privy was in evidence, though Theon saw a champerpot in one shadowed alcove. The only light came from the candles on the table. His feet dangled six feet off the floor.

“My brother’s debts,” the king was muttering. “Joffrey’s too, though that baseborn abomination was no kin to me.” Theon twisted in his chains. He knew that voice. Stannis.

And so it begins. It’s a Theon chapter (who starred in many of the best chapters from A Dance with Dragons and the series, for that matter.) It’s probably one of the few tastes we’ll get of Westeros for the next few years, barring the next Dunk & Egg story and other excerpts from The Winds of Winter. Enjoy it. Savour it.

News

An Aside | HBO Buys Two More Seasons of GAME OF THRONES (maybe, probably)

By Aidan Moher November 29th, 2011

Game of Thrones PosterVia winter-is-coming.net:

A Storm of Swords US paperbackWe reported on this in another post, but the rumors continue to swirl and so we thought it deserved its own post. We are now hearing from multiple sources that HBO plans to order both seasons three and four and film them back-to-back (à la Lord of the Rings). It has already been confirmed that A Storm of Swords would be covered in more than one season. From what we have heard, much of the film crew in Northern Ireland has been told of this plan and has been advised to expect nine months of filming next year.

Matt Staggs at Suvudu believes there’s truth to the rumour:

While I’ve not received any confirmation regarding this rumor, I don’t find it out of the realm of the possible. For one thing, the show is doing really, really well. I know people who haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire or even read fantasy in general who won’t miss an episode of the program, and those who have read the series already know that the later books would require more than a season of episodes each for a faithful adaptation.

Really, it makes sense for all the reasons Staggs indicates. The show is becoming something of a cultural phenomenon and the last I heard A Dance with Dragons was the best-selling novel of the year. Not best-selling Fantasy novel, but best selling novel. Period. It might be dethroned by by Paolini’s Inheritance, Grisham’s The Litigators or King’s 11/22/63, but the point remains that a big, juicy adult Fantasy is making waves among mainstream readers in a way that hasn’t happened since, perhaps, Tolkien broke through with Lord of the Rings. What’s not to like for HBO?

Filming back-to-back also isn’t surprising given that seasons three and four of Game of Thrones are rumoured to cover the events of Storm of Swords, the longest volume of the still-to-be-completed series.

Feature Article

Guest Post | ‘On Rothfuss and GRRM’ or ‘How Many POVs is Too Many?’ by Bradley P. Beaulieu

By Bradley P. Beaulieu November 22nd, 2011

The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley P. BeaulieuMy friends, sometimes you have to be careful what you ask for. When I first started talking to Aidan about a guest post on A Dribble of Ink, I thought of a couple of subjects that seemed easy at the time. The first was about the differences between writing a Book 1 in a series vs. its sequel. The second was about finding the sweet spot in terms of the number of POV characters for an epic fantasy. The first one was pretty easy to knock out, because it was more about relating my experiences over the course of writing the first and second novels in my trilogy. This second one, though, has been a tough nut to crack.

Why? That’s a fair question, because let’s face it: on the surface this question is easy to answer. How many POVs do you need? However many the story needs to tell it effectively. While I believe this to be true, it’s also about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. It doesn’t really illuminate the choices that have to be made with respect to POV, so I think what I’ll try to do is examine the question using two epics I’ve read recently.

On the one extreme, we have George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. How many POVs does Martin have now? A few dozen between A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, which really comprise a single novel broken up geographically (as opposed to breaking a large novel up temporally). Had anyone told an editor twenty years ago that they were going to start a series in which the novels would expand to twenty POV characters, they would have been laughed out of New York. And yet, here it is, a masterful story with a scope about as wide as you can have in fiction.
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