New interview with George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham

Hi there,

This three-way Q&A turned out even better than I ever thought it would. Many thanks to Daniel, Gardner and George for taking the time to answer our questions, and special thanks to Daniel for helping me put it together.

Without further ado, here it is!

- Without giving anything away, what can you tell us about the story that is Hunter's Run?

DA: It's an almost-retro science fiction adventure with elements of psychological allegory and James M. Cain crime noir. But with aliens.

GD: It was primarially conceived of as a rattling good adventure story, but, like most such, if done right, it will, we hope, tell you a bit about the human heart, as it tells you about what we're like under some of the most fundamental stresses: danger, fear of death, greed, anger. Think THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRES. Like Bogart's character Fred C. Dobbs in that movie (like most of US, for that matter!), Ramon is a mixture of good and bad, strengths and weaknesses, and it's always a coin-toss which is going to come out on top.

GRRM: It's a novel about identity, allegiances, and the things that make us human, a manhunt through an alien wilderness that counterpoints the protagonist's own inner journey. I wasn't thinking TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE myself. My own influences and inspirations tended more toward Huck and Jim on their raft, and Genly Ai and Lord Estraven on the ice. With some monsters and knife fights for seasoning.

- A new benchmark in modern SF -- that's what one can read on the back cover of the ARC. So it's that good!?!

DA: (straightface) Yes. (straightface)

GD: We all think it's a good book, or we wouldn't have let if off our desks. As to whether it's THAT good or not--well, they say a writer's works are like children, and if a proud father tells you his child is the smartest and most handsome and gifted child who has ever been born, you make allowances for that. You especially make allowances if the parent has engaged a professional promotion expert and blurb-writer to make these claims on his behalf...

GRRM: It's the job of cover blurbs to herald every book as the greatest novel set to paper. That being said, yes, of course we think the book is good. How good is something the readers will ultimately have to decide. Read the novel and make up your own mind.

- Are there any plans for a possible sequel?

DA: I don't think the plot of this particular book lends itself to a sequel. In a sense, it's the sequel already to Gardner's novel Strangers. It's a rich world and an interesting universe. I think other stories could be set in the same millieu. But this particular character has been through about as much as I think we can put him through.

GD: Never say never again, one thing both Sean Connery and I have learned over the years. There's certainly a lot more that could be written set in the milieu of Sao Paulo. As to whether there'll ever be a direct sequel about Ramon--well, it looks unlikely at this point, but I wouldn't rule it out dogmatically. Look at how many times Dr. Doom was thrown into the volcano and came back several issues later, for instance.

GRRM: As Daniel points out, HUNTER'S RUN is set in the SF universe that Gardner first explored in his novella-turned-novel STRANGERS, a sadly forgotton masterpiece of the 70s. That's a rich and interesting background, I think, with room for a lot more stories, but Gardner is the one who should be writing them, and given the speed at which he turns out novels... well, let's just say he makes me look fast. A direct sequel about Ramon, though? No. That story's been told.

- What ultimately became Hunter's Run started off as a novella-length project from Subterranean Press titled Shadow Twin. It is said that this novella began its life as a story Gardner had partly written but had difficulty completing when he brought George on board, and then it progressed a bit and then stalled out there as well before Daniel came aboard. If that is indeed the case, what were the difficulties with the story that Gardner and George had that kept them from being able to end it?

DA: Having not been there, I will let the guys answer.

GD: We were old and tired. And busy. And there were always more pressing professional matters that needed attention, especially once I became editor of ASIMOV'S. Somehow the moment slipped away, we lost focus, went stale on the story. It's happened to me at least a number of times (and, I think, to George too)--sometimes a story just stalls; sometimes you get it going again, sometimes you don't.

GRRM: I don't think the difficulty was ever with the story. Shadow Twin was just one of those projects that got put on the back burner, for various complex reasons (you can find all the grisly details in the afterword we did for the Subterranean Press edition, if you're interested), and never quite got off. Sometimes when you step away from a project for too long, it goes cold on you, and then it's very hard to get back into it. Almost every writer has a drawer of abandoned projects and half-written novels tucked away somewhere. (Well, Daniel may not, he's still pretty new at this game, but I know that both Gardner and I have 'broken novels' in our files, his NOTTAMUN TOWN and my own BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER). When that happens, sometimes the best thing to do is bring in another writer, for whom the material is new and fresh.

- And then, what did Daniel bring to the table that finally got it moving toward completion?

DA: Um. An ending? I think pretty much an ending.

GD: Youth, energy, ambition, two-fisted virility. Someday HE'LL be a worn-out old fart too, but at the moment, he's not.

GRRM: The story was brand new to Daniel, old news to us. When he got into it, his ideas and enthusiasm reminded Gardner and me of what we'd loved about the project, twenty years ago, and helped to get us fired up again, and pretty soon we were all brainstorming, sparking ideas off one another, and so on.

- At which point did you guys realize that you had enough material for an entire novel and not just a novella? Is the fact that the story was expanded to a novel related to the difficulties in getting it done earlier? Specifically, I'm wondering if the story felt like it needed a lot more room back then.

DA: George always thought there was a novel in it. From the first. My impression was more that there were a lot of possibilities implicit in the novella that we didn't get to play with as much as we'd have liked. We had a whole alien world to explore and invent, and there's a psychological depth that you need a certain amount of length to really draw out. The whole frame story that puts the main action in context was missing from the novella.

GD: As Daniel says, George saw it as a potential novel practically from the beginning, certainly long before the novella was actually finished. Once we'd finished the novella version, I myself began to wish we'd had a little more room (we were bumping up against the commercially feasible limits for a novella in the magazine market), since I found myself wanting to see more of the interchange between Ramon and Maneck--I missed him when he disappeared from the story--and, even more so, wanting to see more interaction between Ramon and RAMON. I think in those two sets of relationships is where much of the real meat of the story lies.

GRRM: Yeah, I believe it was around 1982 or so when I first told Gardner that the story ought to be a novel. He had sent me the opening of it, and I'd been working on it, trying to finish it, but more I realized that we would never be able to fit all that we wanted to do into a novella. Story-wise, the part where I left off felt like the end of the beginning... but if this was indeed to be a novella, it was going to need to be the beginning of the end. I did not see how to wrap up everything satisfactorily in the wordage remaining, so I shipped it back to Gardner and made my pitch for doing it as a novel. I did manage to convince him... but a novel is such a large undertaking that neither of us got back to it for decades.

- Daniel: Did you simply pick up where George and Gardner had left off with the story, or did you find things that needed to be restructured or otherwise revised before the story could move forward? It must have felt pretty sweet to be the one to get this tale back on track!?!

DA: Well the absolute first thing I did was retype it into a word processing program. You have to understand that the original manuscript was done on a manual typewriter. After that, I had to viciously cut about a third of the original (some of which made its way back into the novel). The fragment they gave me was 20,000 words long, and that's about the same length as the final novella. I didn't wind up restructuring much, apart from the condensing, though. And given the start that they had, I thought the ending was pretty obvious. That's often the case, though. Any good story, the ending is sort of implicit even at the beginning. And this is more than a merely good story, you know. It's a benchmark in modern SF. Says so right on the cover.

GD: Actually, I did my initial bit so long ago that we didn't have even manual typewriters, just carved things out on stone tablets. Sending the stone tablets to Daniel was quite expensive. Lots of stamps.

GRRM: Daniel is not quite accurate here. Gardner's original fragment was done on a manual typewriter, yes. (Gargy did not believe in margins either, so the words filled every inch of every page). When I got hold of the story, however, I retyped the whole thing and added my own contribution on an electric typewriter. I was very modern. (Then). I even added margins, which made the story seem much longer.

- Are there any other collaborations between you three in the works?

DA: There have been some vague rumblings and noises, but I think they were mostly George's fans sharpening knives in case he took on a project that wasn't ASOIAF.

GD: As said above, Never say never again. Actually, I think there's a decent possibility that we could do something again someday, although if Daniel keeps selling novels--he's committed to about 25 of them at this point, I think--he may not have the time.

GRRM: Another three-way? Not likely... although ever since we sold HUNTER'S RUN, I have been half-expecting that one day I will open my mailbox and find Gardner's legendary unfinished novel NOTTAMUN TOWN, the one he has been working on since the early 70s. I do expect that I will continue to work with both Daniel and Gardner separately, however. I lured Daniel into my WILD CARDS shared anthology series a couple of years ago, and I hope he will continue to be a part of the series for years to come. And the Great Gargoo and I are co-editing a couple of original anthology (more on those below), and will probably do more in the future if those are successful.

- One would think that collaborative efforts are much more difficult than individual writing endeavors. Some would be concerned with the style, pace, cohesion, etc, and think that it may influence their own part in the project. From an author's perspective, how did you approach this undertaking and how did the others (if at all) influence your own writing? Was it difficult to find consensus during the project or was there general agreement on where the story would go and a mutual agreement to allow artistic freedom to the other writer to take it and run with it?

DA: This sounds weird, but it wasn't actually something that came up much. We all contributed ideas on the main plot and the final product just grew out of it. There were some things that we didn't agree on stylistically. Gardner and I in particular have very different voices and attitudes toward things like description. But I figured if I wanted it to sound exactly the way I'd have written it, I should have done it myself. Collaboration means having a final product that is different from what any one writer would have done alone. Otherwise, what's the point?

GD: As a good modernist and therefore a minimalist, Daniel kept taking a lot of the color out, thinking of it as overwriting, but since both George and I are writers whose effect largely DEPENDS on the use of flamboyent local color, I kept putting it back in, and even adding more. I think it helped smooth out difference in style that one person--me--did the final smoothing and consolidating draft, as I could edit anything that seemed to veer too much from the overall "voice" of the book. I've found that it's best with three-way collaborations--of which I've done several, with various combinations of writers--to have one person do the final smoothing draft, ensuring reasonable consistency.

GRRM: Every collaboration is different. In the past, I have collaborated with Howard Waldrop, Lisa Tuttle, George Guthridge, Melinda Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, David Peckinpah, Howard Gordon & Alex Gansa, and all the myriad writers of the Wild Cards Consortium, and it's never been the same experience twice. You have to change your working methods to match the personalities involved. And yes, Gardner is right, it does help if one of the participants has "final cut," so you don't find yourself stalemated by creative differences. HUNTER'S RUN began with Gardner and grew out of his universe, so it was appropriate that he have the final say. That being said, I don't think there were any major disagreements on this one.

- Shadow Twin was a limited edition novella from Subterranean Press. Was it difficult to find a publisher interested in the novel-length Hunter's Run?

DA: It was by New York Times Bestselling Author George RR Martin, Mayor of Science Fiction Gardner Dozois, and some spear carrier no one had ever heard of. Editors were pretty willing to at least take a peek. And then, of course, the quality of the manuscript carried some weight. It is, you know, a new benchmark in modern SF.

GD: Since we were working with an 800-pound gorilla such as George, a mega bestseller, it wasn't hard at all. About a week and a half after I'd finished working on the novel, we had an English sale, and several days after that, an American sale as well. If it had been a solo novel of mine, it could well still be out there making the rounds of publishers. (Of course, this being the computer age helped a lot, too--now you can send an entire novel manuscript thousands of miles away in the blink of an eye; in the old days, the hardcopy manuscript would have taken weeks just getting across the Atlantic.)

GRRM: We had a lot of interest right from the start. Of course, the novella version had been quite successful. Before the Subterranean Press edition, "Shadow Twin" had appeared online in SCI-FICTION and in paper in ASIMOV'S, and had been very well reviewed, so the publishers were primed and ready when we offered them the novel version. It also helped that we had a finished novel to show them, rather than trying to sell the book as chapters-and-outline. An unfinished book would have encountered much more resistance, I think -- after all, I am a couple years late delivering my solo novel, and Gardner is a couple decades late delivering his, so the editors might justifiably have wondered whether they would ever actually see a book, despite Daniel's splendid record of meeting all his deadlines. By presenting them with a finished book, we removed those doubts.

- George: If one looks back upon your writing career, it's obvious that you have a variety of interests that range from writing, collaborating, editing, etc. In recent years the pressure is definitely on you to complete whatever ASOIAF installment you're presently working on to the detriment of anything else that might interest you. How difficult is it to reconcile every project you wish to work on? Do fans' expectations weigh you down on occasions, or is that just the price one must pay for the sort of success you have achieved?

GRRM: A bit of both, actually. I've had a long career, and there have been times when nobody gave a damn what I was working on or when it might come out. I can still remember those days, and believe me, it helps to put it all in perspective when I get snarky emails about A DANCE WITH DRAGONS being late. At least they care. That being said, the pressure does bother me at times, and I have some "fans" who are quite blunt about their disinterest in my other projects. Of course, many other writers have had to deal with the same thing. I once heard Stephen R. Donaldson speak about the day he realized that some of his readers were Donaldson fans and some were Covenant fans, and that the latter far outnumbered the former. Frank Herbert went through it too, with DUNE.

I do have a variety of interests, as you say. I enjoy editing as well as writing, and when I write I like to write different things. You can't just do one thing over and over and over; that way lies creative stagnation and madness. I don't expect that any of my other projects will ever be as successful as A Song of Ice and Fire, but that's cool, they don't need to be. Just to be clear, though, doing other projects does not mean that I have "lost interest" in Ice & Fire, as some of my more obsessive readers seem to fear. It just means I am interested in other things as well. Just because I still love Popinjay and the Turtle and my other Wild Cards characters does not mean I have stopped loving Arya and Tyrion and Dany.

- You all work on personal projects, of course. Yet how much fun is it to have the opportunity to work together on a project such as Hunter's Run?

DA: I thought it was a giggle. I think there's an idea, though, that collaborating somehow makes it less work than a solo project. I have to say that wasn't my experience. There aren't better minds to work with than George and Gardner, though. They understand this genre better than I ever will.

GD: It was a lot of fun. In the places where I was overwriting Daniel's first draft, it was almost more like editing than writing, and I've always found editing easier.

GRRM: Writing is a lonely business for the most part. Just you and the blank sheet of paper... or the blinking cursor, these days. A collaboration is a nice change of pace. It gives you a chance to have some fun, bounce ideas off each other, have someone else come to rescue when you get stuck. The only downside comes when you cash the check, and have to share the money with these other clowns.

- In Law School many teachers forbade teams of three people, because three's a crowd and there's always someone who's not pulling is or her own weight. So who's the slacker in this group?

DA: George. Totally George. He was always sneaking off to work on ASOIAF, leaving us holding the bag. I told him "Look, you just do this chapter, and I'll go decide what happens to Danerys." But no . . .

GD: I've found that in collaborations EVERY collaborator thinks that he's doing the bulk of the work, but, in fact, in successful collaborations, every collaborator is vital, the authors combine strengths rather than weaknesses to produce something than none of them could have produced on their own. I certainly think that's true with HUNTER'S RUN. There's stuff in there that Daniel came up with that George and I never would have thought of in a thousand years if we were writing solo novels, and very probably vice versa. It's a novel none of us could have come up with on our own, which I think is the hallmark of a valid collaboration.

GRRM: Who, moi? A slacker? Well, okay. But I did draw the map.

- Gardner and George: Robin Hobb and Joe Haldeman have recently mentioned that they're signed up to provide stories for an anthology you're both editing titled Warriors. What can you tell us about that?

GD: As you say, the anthology is called WARRIORS, and we've recently sold it to Tor for a six-figure advance. We conceived it from the beginning as a cross-genre anthology, with stories from famous writers from several different genres, including SF, fantasy, historical, mystery, even westerns. In addition to Robin Hobb and Joe Haldeman, we have writers such as Lawrence Block, Peter S. Beagle, Tony Hillerman, Neil Gaiman, Steven Saylor, Cecelia Holland, Tad Williams, Howard Waldrop, and others, as wide a range as possible.

I'll let George tell you about the theme itself, since it was initially his idea.

GRRM: This is way premature, since we've just started work on WARRIORS and the book most likely won't appear until 2009 at the earliest... but Gardner has the basics. This will be a big, landmark anthology with an all-star lineup of writers, almost all of them award winners and bestsellers in their own fields. The theme is war and the warrior ethos. What makes WARRIORS new and different and (we hope) exciting is that this is a cross-genre anthology. People have been telling stories about warriors for as long as they have been telling stories, so that seemed to be the perfect concept for the book we wanted to do. Fantasy swordsmen, space pirates, medieval knights, western cowboys, grunts in Vietnam, doughboys in the trenches, urban gangbangers, Mafia hitmen, gridiron legends, women warriors, child warriors, warriors whose "strength is not to fight" (to quote Mr. Dylan), all of 'em will be fair game in this book. Fantasy, SF, horror, historical fiction, suspense, mainstream, romance, and every possible cross-combination of same will be included. We want to show the readers that it's the story that matters, not the label. And yes, I will writing a story for the book myself, and yes, right now it looks as though it will be the much anticipated third Dunk & Egg story. (Though I reserve the right to change my mind).

- Gardner and George: Dan Simmons recently updated his website to announce that he'll be writing a story for Songs of the Dying Earth, a proposed anthology of stories set in Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" milieu, to be edited by the both of you. What can you tell us about that?

GD: Since George and I are both major, major Jack Vance fans, putting together an anthology to honor him was a natural idea. SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH will invite some of the major writers in the fantasy field to write stories set in the milieu of Vance's most famous work, THE DYING EARTH. In addition to Dan Simmons, we also have commitments from writers such as Robert Silverberg, Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, Glen Cook, Elizabeth Hand, Liz Williams, John C. Wright, and others (although of course, as with every original anthology, I should caution that not everybody who has expressed interest in contributing may actually contribute when push comes to shove; most of our writers are pretty enthusiastic about writing in THE DYING EARTH milieu, though, so I expect most of them to come through). The book has been sold in England, but is still looking for an American publisher, so it's a little premature to discuss it.

GRRM: The Vance anthology actually grew out of WARRIORS, in a sense. It's no secret that Jack Vance is one of my favorite writers, so when Gardner and I started to put together the WARRIORS proposal, I contacted his agent in hopes of getting a story from him. Vance has just turned 91, however, and he is no longer writing. The thought that there might never be another Dying Earth story saddened me more than I can say. That's when the idea of this tribute anthology came to me. Vance has always been a real "writer's writer," and I knew that there were lots of other writers who love the Dying Earth as much as I do, and would sell their firstborn children for the chance to write a story set in that world. I broached the notion to Jack's agent, who took it to Jack and his son John, and I am pleased to say that they gave their consent. So now we're off. As Gardner said, we don't yet have an American publisher lined up, but I believe we'll have one soon. And we've had to beat the writers off with a stick. Vance has a LOT of fans among today's young fantasists and SF writers. Deservedy so. He's one of the greats.

- Speculative fiction is all well and good. Yet is there any chance that, gifted writers that you are, you will use that talent for more "worthwhile" literary endeavors, such as writing about the triumph of the human spirit à la Terry Goodkind!?!

DA: There are several other genres I'd like to play in before I die -- mystery, for instance -- but I've never seen the "worthwhile" section in the bookstore. Is there a place they shelve the worthwhile stuff? More seriously, I plan to write what I enjoy writing. If some of it turns out to be worthwhile, that'll be nice, but I wouldn't set out to make something serious and literary for fear of overshooting and just being pretentious. You know what I mean. "A new benchmark in something or other". Like that.

GD: I've never had much interest in working outside of the fantasy/science fiction field. If I get an idea for something outside the genres, though, I won't rule it out. Never say never again.

GRRM: I think Daniel and Gardner have missed the, ah, irony of your quoting Mr. Goodkind on this point, Pat. Goodkind's disavowal of the fantasy label is nothing new, of course. I suspect it stems from the same desire to be taken seriously as a writer that has motivated similar denials from other authors in years past, talents as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, and Margaret Atwood. The same sort of denials are being put out right now as regards Cormac McCarthy (of course it's not SF, it's literature). None of us wants to be consigned to the playpen, or have our work dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration as literature because of the label on the spine. Myself, I think a story is a story is a story, and only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. Genre labels are marketing devices, no more. It has been said that I have "changed genres" several times during my career, but from where I sit, I haven't changed at all. I write the stories I want to write, and let the publishers and reviewers worry about what to call them. I plan on continuing to do that.

- Will you guys be touring or making appearances this fall/winter to promote this book?

DA: George was hoping we would. I think he particularly wanted to go to England because you can drive across it.

GD: If so, nobody's told me about it. I think they'd prefer George anyway.

GRRM: I can't think of anything that would be more fun than taking our act on the road and touring with Gardner and Daniel, but somehow I doubt that any of our publishers will be willing to foot the bill for all three of us. Daniel's right, though, a British tour would be easier. I loved touring in the UK for A FEAST FOR CROWS. They give you a car and a driver, and every morning the publisher's liaison picks you up at your comfortable London hotel and you drive to that day's signing. After it's over, you drive back. Touring in the US is much more stressful, since in between your scheduled events you have to fly from stop to stop, so every morning it's up at dawn and off to the airport to fly to another city, meet another escort, check into a new hotel, etc. I'm glad to do it, but it does make me wish I was twenty years younger.

- More and more, authors/editors/publicists/agents are discovering the potential of all the SFF blogs/websites/message boards on the internet. Do you keep an eye on what is being discussed out there, especially if it concerns you? Or is this too much of a distraction?

DA: I probably would follow it more if I didn't take it quite so personally. One bad review on Amazon, and I'm in the dumps for a day or two. What I really like is seeing what folks are saying about other writers, especially ones that I like or really good ones I haven't read yet. There's an idea, I think, that we give up our identities as readers when we start writing, but I'm basically a fan.

GD: I try to avoid being sucked into the blogsphere to any great extent, since blogging and participating in message-boards can be a tremendous eater of time that could be being used instead to work on other projects. That being said, I think that the blogsphere is perhaps THE great new way to promote books here in the 21st Century; if people start talking favorably and excitedly about your book across a wide variety of blogs, I'm sure it could have a big impact on sales, and it's one of the few ways to advertise to a wider audience that doesn't cost any money (unfortunately, they have to actually LIKE your book to start buzzing about it in blogs; there's no way to MAKE them like it if they don't). I also think a wave of the future for promoting books is to put up advertisements for them on YouTube and MySpace; I've tried to talk publishers into doing this with my last several books, but publishers are behind the times, this is an unknown area for most of them, and so there's a lot of resistance to doing this, and so far I haven't managed to talk anyone into it. This is one of the great promotional opportunities that so far is being wasted, though, and one day the publishing world will catch up with it, mark my words.

GRRM: I have a live journal, my Not-A-Blog, and keep it up as time permits. It's fun, aside from the trolls. I am a veteran of GEnie as well, and during GEnie's heydey back in the 80s and 90s, I would often find myself signing on and posting several times a day, and getting drawn into all sorts of discussions (good) and flamewars (not so good). Much as I enjoyed that, it was a huge timesink, so much so that when GEnie folded I made a conscious decision to stay out of similar bulletin boards in the future. I avoid the Ice & Fire boards for some of the same reasons. I do read the reviews of my stuff that appear in newspapers and fanzines and even e-zines and some of the better blogs (like your own, and Stego's), but I don't read the Amazon reviews and I avoid message boards. It is not that I disdain these venues or those who participate in them. I just don't have the time.

- I don't know about Daniel and Gardner, but everyone knows that George is a big NFL football fan. So who's going to win the Super Bowl this year?

GD: Super Bowl? What's that? I know nothing about either American or British football. One of the few current players from either kind whose name I know is Beckham--and that's only because I saw BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM.

GRRM. My dream is to live long enough to see a Subway Superbowl between my beloved Giants and my beloved Jets, but sadly, I don't think it will be this year. I'd like to see the Saints make it from the NFC. Nawlins has been through a lot, and deserves a victory. Once there, they will most likely need to upset the hated Patriots and their coach, Evil Little Bill.

- George: Your rabid fans would castrate me and feed me my own balls if I didn't ask this question. I kind of like my testicles where they are, so I have to ask: What is the current progress report pertaining to A Dance with Dragons? With the way things are progressing now, do you feel confident that the manuscript can be turned in this fall?

GRRM: DANCE will be done when it's done. I have given up predicting delivery dates. When I do, I am always wrong. Watch my website. As soon as the book is finished, I will note it there. Meanwhile, I have lots of other stuff coming out. HUNTER'S RUN comes first, in three editions (UK first, then US, then a signed limited from Subterranean), followed by the US hardcover of DREAMSONGS in the fall (in two volumes), then the new Wild Cards book INSIDE STRAIGHT come January. A limited edition of FEVRE DREAM illustrated by Justin Sweet will also appearing in there somewhere. I am going to be all over the bookstores these next six months. And I haven't even talked about the comic books, the miniatures, the replica swords, the minibusts...

- Anything else you wish to share with your fans?

DA: How about a quote from Oscar Wilde. Those are always good. Um. Here.

GD: Go buy lots of copies of HUNTER'S RUN. I could use the money.

GRRM: Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

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To coincide with this interview, I have copy number 1 of the numbered limited edition of Hunter's Run up for grabs, compliments of Subterranean Press. It doesn't get much better than this!;-)

The rules are the same as usual. First off, you need to send an email at reviews@(no-spam)gryphonwood.net with the header "LIMITED." Remember to remove the "no spam" thingy.

Second, your email must contain your full mailing address (that's snail mail!), otherwise your message will be deleted.

Lastly, multiple entries will disqualify whoever sends them. And please include your screen name and the message boards that you frequent using it, if you do hang out on a particular MB.

Good luck to all the participants!:-)