Roles filled, offered, and scrapped in A Game of Thrones pilot, and GRRM still has problems with Meereenese knots

George R. R. Martin posted a lot in one go on his LiveJournal this morning (or evening, depending where you live), including some news about the HBO A Game of Thrones pilot and A Dance with Dragons.

HBO Pilot: D&D have cast one more role and have an offer out to a wonderful actor on another. Sorry, no clues, I’m clued out for the present. One of the roles that was yet to be filled has been written out of the pilot. No huge thing, he wasn’t in that part of the book in any case… though we did have a world-class thespian lined up to play the part. Character and actor will both be back if we go to series.

Drat, no clues? Great, now we have to wait a while for official announcements. Pfft.

And I wonder which role was taken out of the pilot…based on what I know about the pilot’s script and the book, it could be Grand Maester Pycelle. According to the script, he’s supposed to be talking to Cersei in the scene where Jon Arryn lies on his deathbed, but that was never shown in the book.

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS: I took a good hard swack at the Meereenese knot. The sword bounced off and cut my nose off. Bugger.

GRRM has been stuck with “the Meereenese knot” for a long while now, so I guess it’s safe to say that he’s suffering from a writer’s block. And based on the way he described it, this one seems more painful than writer’s blocks usually are. Ouch.

George R. R. Martin at Montreal Worldcon

Matthew Surridge of Montreal Gazette interviewed George R. R. Martin at the Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon, and an mp3 file of the interview is available here. He and Martin talk about A Dance with Dragons, the HBO Game of Thrones pilot, and Martin’s career in general.

Fans who are itching to know when A Dance with Dragons is coming out will be disappointed that Martin still doesn’t mention the book’s release date, but at least he mentions that the manuscript is already past 1000 pages long.

On a personal note, I’m content to know that the book is progressing nicely and will patiently wait for the release like a good little fangirl even though  I’m honestly dying to read it. I just wish some other fans would exercise the same patience and stop whining to Neil Gaiman, or whoever else whiny fans whine to. As Neil Gaiman so wisely put it, “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”

Interviews and whiny fans aside, rumors have also been circulating that the role of Dany in the HBO pilot has already been cast, but Martin himself refutes it on his LJ. He also mentions in the same entry that the hotel that he and some other science fiction and fantasy writers were partying at threw some of them out for “talking too loud”, and that fans only had access to one of the hotel’s elevators because the rest were reserved for their “real guests”.

Fandom Spotlight: A Song of Ice and Fire

Well, you had to have seen this coming based on my posts on ASOIAF figures and the Game of Thrones HBO series, right? I partially blame a certain LiveJournal community called Westeros Sorting for my sudden bursts of ASOIAF fan-ing; getting together with fangirls (and fanboys) to have some good clean fun with fanstuff (i.e. fanart, fanfiction, fanmade graphics, speculations and theories, and crazy interpretations of characters/events) does funny things to your brain.

Though George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has been around for around thirteen years now (A Game of Thrones, the first book, was first published in 1996), I only got around to reading the books early last year.

If I had to choose just one word to describe the series, I’d have to go with “epic”. The series is set in a fantastic world with roughly 8,000 years worth of history, and revolves around a cast of dynamic and three-dimensional characters. The books’ chapters are written from the third-person subjective (or limited) perspective, and Martin does a fantastic job of switching perspectives and keeping to his characters’ personalities. The story itself is epic; it involves wars, conspiracies, and myriad of subplots and secrets that one can never really tell what to expect. And he doesn’t sugar-coat the kind of things that happen in ASOIAF’s medieval world that is in constant anarchy, which is something that I find to be a welcome reprieve from fantasy books that idealize everything and/or leave the gritty/dark/disturbing details out. Not that I’m a huge fan of psychos who smash babies’ heads in, warriors raping women after razing their villages, people being beheaded, and descriptions of people performing normal bodily functions like pissing and taking a shit; it’s just that those details make the world of ASOIAF more real and believable.

I think that the only relatively disappointing thing about ASOIAF is the delay in the production of the HBO series and publication of the fifth book in the series (there have been no updates since December), A Dance with Dragons (the expected publication date has been moved from late 2006 to September 2008 to April/September 2009). I’m dying to know what’s going to happen in the fifth book, and I’ve only been waiting for a year (give or take a few months). I can only imagine how hard it must be for fans who have been waiting for it since 2005.