Tag: George R. R. Martin

Writer’s Desk: Whatever Works

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment


Successful writers have their preferred tools. A kind of pencil. Style of desk. The best music to run in the background.

Some writers looking for ways to get ahead in the game often go looking for answers in those habits. They will be frustrated, because whatever works for one writer likely will be dead on delivery for another. Take word processing.

According to the New Republic‘s Joseph Livingstone, word processing was a nascent technology through the 1970s into the early 1980s. By 1984, many writers (Anne Rice, Michael Chabon) had switched to using the new program WordStar. A pre-DOS application, its basic text look appears downright Paleolithic today.

Nevertheless, a number of authors in the genre field continue to use WordStar today. Why? Because they like writing on it. Consider George R. R. Martin. He uses the no-frills WordStar to write all his fantasy doorstoppers.

If something helps you write, stick with it. Even if that means giving up on spellcheck.

Weekend Reading: April 10, 2015

On By chrisbarsantiIn Omnium GatherumLeave a comment

Readers’ Corner: New George R.R. Martin Novella

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books1 Comment
Winter is coming...eventually.
Winter is coming…eventually.

So, as anybody who follows anything to do with George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books knows, the man takes a while to write them. No surprise, as they’re all 800 or so pages of 110-proof plot, not a lot of air in there for character-building or atmosphere. It’s action and intrigue all the way through. So when he took six years from the publication of the series’ fourth book, A Feast of Crows, to come out with the fifth one in 2011, A Dance with Dragons, people were getting agitated. Now, with the HBO series adaptation going gangbusters, and with everyone all caught up on the books, anxiousness builds for the sixth novel, which will be released…sometime.

Dangerous WomenAdding to the anxiety is the fact that Martin took time off from that book to pen a short novella for a new anthology titled Dangerous Women that’s hitting shelves in December; Tor just posted an excerpt from it here; this is how it begins:

The Dance of the Dragons is the flowery name bestowed upon the savage internecine struggle for the Iron Throne of Westeros fought between two rival branches of House Targaryen during the years 129 to 131 AC. To characterize the dark, turbulent, bloody doings of this period as a “dance” strikes us as grotesquely inappropriate. No doubt the phrase originated with some singer. “The Dying of the Dragons” would be altogether more fitting, but tradition and time have burned the more poetic usage into the pages of history, so we must dance along with the rest…

Enjoy the wait for the rest.

Laura Miller’s great New Yorker piece on Martin is here.

My review of A Dance with Dragons is here.