A contest with thrones and swords can only be seen with the aid of a Shaman's Conjurings

Just in case anybody reading this blog is living under a rock, George R. R. Martin has a new book in that little, mediocre (he types with a laugh) A Song of Ice and Fire saga coming out in November entitled A Feast for Crows. To celebrate and promote the release, his US Publisher, BantamSpectra is running an online contest entitled A Quest of Thrones, where you can win cool stuff, like copies of the book, a signed bookplate, etc. Even cooler, from my perspective, is that SFFWorld is one of the participant Web sites. On one hand, I can't join the Quest since I'm so heavily involved with SFFWorld, but on the other, I'm thrilled our Web site is partaking in, arguably, the release of the most anticpated fantay novel of the year (or maybe last couple of years). This should kick up the traffic and improve the visibility of one of the genre's largest and best on-line Web sites/communities, which is of course SFFWorld. So go register for this thing right now!

Here's something really cool, you can bid for a chance to be in your favorite writer's next work. Direct links to specific author auctions:

Neil Gaiman
Michael Chabon
Stephen King
Lemony Snicket
Peter Straub

All the proceeds will go to the First Amendment Project, orgainized by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon who was inspired directly by Neil Gaiman's auctioning the right to name a boat in his forthcoming Anansi Boys. When Gaiman did the Anansi Boys auction, it wound up raising over $3000 for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, so I would expect these auctions would be far out of my price range.

I just received an advance of John Marco's Sword of Angels. This thing is a beast of a book at over 900 pages, and I mean that as a compliment. I really enjoy John's writing and storytelling, so having this much of it under a nice shiny cover will be good. Once I finish Gary's third GemQuest book, The Shards, I'll move on to John's book, followed up with a review and an e-mail interview for SFFWorld. I finished Robin Hobb's wonderful Shaman's Crossing two nights ago and was completely entranced. I'll not spill anything until my review is written and posted, and I'm hoping to conduct an e-mail interview with her as well. I'm really looking forward to the second novel in the Soldier Son Trilogy Forest Mage, hopefully in about a year.

Of course all of the above are distractions from the frustations of real life, which constantly throws spit balls at you, decieves you into thinking you've turned a good corner for once, and leaves you complacent with everything else.