As we reported earlier this week, George R.R. Martin honored his long standing booking in Virginia to appear at Mysticon in Roanoke. Martin has done a huge amount of cutting down of appearances and other projects in order to focus on finishing The Winds of Winter by 2017, but as he noted on his blog, this one was booked over two years prior, it was sold out months in advance, and he felt like he couldn’t not show up.
For those hoping for new chapters to be debuted at this reading, I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for a re-reading. Martin read aloud “1.5 chapters,” according to our lucky anonymous source who went to the event. They were the two Arianne chapters which have been previously released before. (You can read the archived version of the first chapter here and a summary of the second chapter, which has not been published on line, here.)
As always, Martin forbade anyone from recording him reading aloud from the book. But some video has leaked out, part of the Q&A period that Martin did with the moderator. Perhaps Mysticon should have also demanded fans not record this segment either as the questions that Martin endures from the hapless moderator are almost a parody of a bad panel. Martin responds in terse, short responses.
Since the Facebook video doesn’t embed properly, here is a transcript.
Not all the questions were quite as predictable. My favorite tidbit from the Q&A is that Martin made fun of Quidditch, calling it “the stupidest game.” For the record, he endorses Rollerball.
A highlight of hearing @GRRMspeaking talk - hearing him gush over golden age sci fi, and his love of Barsoom and Trantor #mysticon
— Sean CW Korsgaard (@SCWKorsgaard) February 27, 2016
Perhaps he should be the one to take a crack at bringing A Princess of Mars to the big screen next time.
And there was cake!
And yes, our anonymous source said sitting down with Martin eating cake is just as surreal as you might think.
Now, before you all start in on the “tell Martin to put that cake down and write!” stuff, please note: Chocolate cake is, in fact, one of the best creativity fuels known to man. So as far as I’m concerned, this is Martin fueling his brain for the next round of writing after his short convention break.