Jim Hines taunts the Intarwebz in a short but hilarious post (via Tobias Buckell).

George RR Martin had a brief surge of optimism about his progress on the next Ice and Fire novel. Let's hope he can carry the good vibes and finish that finicky beast of a book!

An unlikely tale that almost is too far-out to be non-fiction, The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? at the Times Online (via Jed Hartman's blog). The story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim... Well worth reading!

Some links:

>> A Song of Fire and Ice video game rights optioned This sounds like a game franchise that might interest me. Even though franchise games (Star Wars, LotR) games in my experience are seldom great games.

>> Release day for Jay Lake: Green hits the shelves today.

>> Japanese weird: Cyber Figure Alice on sale now. In a must-see link for Idoru (W. Gibson) fans, this is a virtual girl/pet that you can carry around in your pocket. I need to look at it some more to figure out how it works, but the video is kind of interesting.

I stumbled upon this cool little blog: http://blogoficeandfire.blogspot.com. It's the record of someone reading the novel(s) for the first time. The blogger, a certain Jason, has a nice down-to-earth style and tone that is quite funny when contrasted to the deadly seriousness of much of George RR Martin's writing... Enjoy.

In a delightfully phrased response to a reader e-mail, Neil Gaiman writes up a powerful reply to any fanboy who is outraged at the fact that the authors of their favorite series spend their time doing anything other than writing the next sequel.

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the
books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series
was a contract with him:..

Good point there. It's not because we fork over a puny fifteen dollars to buy volume one of a series, that we get any sort of claim on the author's time. Gaiman also puts it a little more strongly, with his characteristic direct verbiage.

In other news, I saw a powerful documentary on the landing at Omaha beach yesterday night - in between baby feedings. Amazing to hear the veterans talk about the build-up towards the landing, and how they were unaware of the danger that waited. They said "they were just going to do it" and they "did not think much of what was ahead".
Sadly for them, the Germans had fortified the beach in the months after the Allied decision to land there had been taken, and the artillery and aerial bombardments missed their targets completely, turning the beach into a desperate killing zone. I don't have anything useful to add about this, other than express my wonder at how those young people ever were able to jump out of the landing craft and press on, despite the carnage that surely they must have known (or did they really not see it coming?) must follow.

A couple of sugary-sweet links for you sweet-tooths out there:

>> The Perfect Job as according to Neil Gaiman
Did I mention that Neil Gaiman is the author of some of my favorite books of all time?
Not only did I have something of a revelation watching Neverwhere on the Beeb when I was what, fourteen or so - the revelation being that fantasy did not have to be all-out in-your-face elves and orcs in order to be deeply interesting; no, he also wrote American Gods and Anansi Boys, two books that are thematically related and that left a deep mark on my soul. Underneath the light-hearted tongue-in-cheekness of Gaiman's writing lies a vein of sparkling insight in the core fabric of real life.
Anyway: Gaiman points us to his favorite job - let's just say it involves Iceland and elves. Hilarious but true...

>> Did Ambrose Pierce invent the emoticon?
On William Gibson's blog - yes, another one of my literary heroes - an interesting snippet about how the emoticon might have been invented as early as... 1912?

I promised some thoughts on Gibson. What has always appealed to me in his work is the absolute minimalism that characterizes his style. Using short, terse sentences, he somehow manages to both drive the plot forward at breakneck speed and to paint an intensely realistic picture of his near-future/future-present environments. And his short blog posts speak of this very same talent: sometimes no more than a few words and a link, sometimes a little worked, they all fit into his piercing analysis of our modern age.

>> John Scalzi on "Unfilmable" movies
Interesting article on books or comics that are (were) thought to be unfilmable, yet have been turned into blockbuster/failed (strike what does not apply) flicks regardless.
I also learned from this post that A Song of Fire and Ice (by George RR Martin, I'm currently reading volume 3) has been optioned by HBO. That sounds interesting!

The SF Site is always a good source for news on the SFF publishing front: they spit out good and in-depth reviews on almost everything that is published in the SFF world, and they've now published their own "best of year" list for 2008.

Read the list here.

I'm sad to say that I have only read one of the ten novels listed on that page. I really must read more... I did read Neil Gaiman's the Graveyard Book. And I really, really loved that. I'm a big Gaiman fan. For me, he's perhaps the best SFF author around today.

As for the other books on the list, I'll have to check a few of those. Scalzi's Zoe's Tale is one I look forward to picking up - I really loved his Old Man's War, and I'm a regular on his blog as well.

Joe Abercrombie sounds interesting; I plan to put his work on my to-read list as well. I'm really enjoying the gritty world of George RR Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, but I've taken a break on that series (don't want to get over-exposed because that would reduce my enjoying of the series; also he's still working on it so there's no hurry!). Perhaps Abercrombie would be a good fit for that hole in my fantasy reading slot :-)

On a more personal note, I need to finish some last edits on The Snow Fell Fast and Final, and then I'm going to officially call it finished and get on to something new. Something entirely different is playing around in my head, some with lots action, bushfires, and aboriginals. Yummy!

I haven't posted anything for a while, for a variety of reasons:

1. Reading. Yes, I've been reading. Lots of reading - rather than writing. I was a voracious reader in my teens and tweens, right until our son was born. I kind of stopped making time for reading then, but now, as I picked up my pen and tried to write stuff of my own, I realised I had gotten out of touch with the voices that I love, with the stories that make me ache and burn inside.

So I started reading again. I finished Gibson's Spook Country, which had been lying around for a while, rushed through A Game of Thrones (and am now barreling on in volume two of A Song of Fire and Ice) and now, ten minutes ago, turned the last page of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. More on that later, I'm still too touched to analyse why it resonates so profoundly with me.*

2. Life. Work in times of Depression. Things that interfere and take away my drive to create.

3. Rewriting Total Immersion based on some valuable input from the SFF Writing Workshop people.

* Still listening to Sigur Ros, also to their previous album Takk, which is even more dramatic and makes for a great soundtrack to George RR Martin's epic fantasy!