George Martin himself posted the latest on the proposed HBO adaptation of A Game of Thrones:

The latest news on HBO front is that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have turned in the second draft of the pilot script for A GAME OF THRONES, and their rewrite is presently being read and evaluated by the powers-that-be at HBO. In other words, it's the normal process, which is long and often slow. So far, the reports are good, and HBO seems to like what they're seeing... but no, there's no greenlight yet, A GAME OF THRONES remains a script in development, not a series in production.

Read the full post here.

Fantasy Book Critic posted a great interview with author Kate Elliott earlier this week.  As with most of their interviews, it's detailed and engaging, with enthusiastic answers from the author.  But most interesting about this interview in particular is what Ms. Elliott has to say about writing as a career and producing work in a reliably timely fashion:

Q: One of the things that most impresses me about you as a writer, is your ability to produce novels at a regular, almost yearly rate. What's your secret?

Kate: Desperation.

On a material level, in terms of earning a living, a person might write and produce because s/he needs the money. I am currently able to write full-time, but I also have a spouse whose work provides lower-cost health insurance for our family. Obviously if I had to work another job and write, I would not be able to write as much.

On a career level, perhaps one is driven to produce regularly in order to maintain the momentum of a building career, or at least not to lose too much momentum. Big gaps between books can hurt shelf life, can cause an author to fall out of the public eye, can hurt sales. In some cases, a big gap between books might throw the much awaited novel of a writer into high relief (e.g. George R. R. Martin's forthcoming fantasy), but it's just as likely to set back a writer's career.

When my children were little--and given that I was home all the time with them--I often wrote in order to get mental space for myself, in my own world where others did not, for five minutes or an hour or two, intrude. Writing at that time was a form of sanity.

In the larger sense, I have difficulty conceiving of existing without writing, so in that sense I write and continue to write because it's like breathing. It's not that I'm desperate to breathe; it's that I have to in order to be alive.

Also, I am aware that we cannot predict what will happen tomorrow: my career or my life could be over next week (although obviously I hope not!), or I could (as I devoutly hope) be churning along still writing and publishing in my 90s like the late Jack Williamson. I have a lot of stories I want to tell, and boy will they be pissed if they don't get their chance to be told. That's desperation.

Elliott is touching on a much larger question here -- the problem of being prolific.  Perhaps more than any other genre, fantasy authors differ greatly in their comparative quantities of work product.  Some authors produce more than two books a year; others take three years to publish a single volume.  Is this difference entirely coincidental and based on personal ability and talent, or is there a ratio between quantity and quality?  Presuming a certain base level of professional ability and talent, can we presume that those authors that publish less frequently generally produce deeper, better works? 

It's interesting that Elliott describes the huge gap between George Martin's last book and his as-yet-unpublished sequel as having a positive marketing effect, given that Martin himself has written at length about what a struggle it has been to complete his forthcoming novel, A Dance With Dragons.

Speaking of George Martin, A Dribble of Ink put up a link last week to an article on A Game of Thrones written by up and coming British fantasy author Joe Abercrombie for SFX Magazine. 

When I started A Feast for Crows the other night, I felt sad. I love rereading this series, and it's always a bummer to realize that I'm coming to the end of it. For years now, I've waited for the fourth installment, A Dance with Dragons. George R. R. Martin is not, whatever else he might be, a speedy writer. He produces each installment with the slow, methodical deliberation of the three-toed sloth. However, considering that he's a genius, I can forgive him this.Now, as I delve into Crows once again, I'm considering the top 5 reasons why Martin is the preeminent fantasy writer of our time...

For those of you wondering about the rumored HBO production of George R. R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wertzone has a useful round-up of the official facts to date:

The deal for HBO to option the television rights to A Song of Ice and Fire was ongoing in 2006 and concluded in January 2007, when GRRM announced the news on his website. Subsequent blog entries confirmed that the writing of the pilot script had commenced. Prior to the start of the Writer's Guild of America Strike in November 2007, writer-producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had completed a pilot script which GRRM had signed off on. This script had been passed to HBO, who were considering it and running budget estimates for the series at the time that the strike began. As with all Hollywood television projects, work on the adaption was suspended until the strike concluded in mid-February 2008.

Essentially, since HBO's option has yet to expire and the writers' strike has concluded, there is still a very real possibility of it happening.  Wertzone goes on to describe the proposed scope of the project:

No final decision has been made but the tentative plan is for HBO to adapt A Song of Ice and Fire as a series of 13-episode television seasons (potentially seven seasons in length, one for each novel). Whilst the project would be high-budget, it would not be as expensive as HBO's previous major costume drama, Rome, and would probably be filmed in Eastern Europe or perhaps New Zealand due to the lowered production costs.

As always, take anything you read on the Internet with a grain of salt: although Werzone seems to have based their information primarily on official sources, nothing is official until you hear it from either GRRM or HBO.

As any good reader of the genre knows, George R. R. Martin is one of the biggest names in fantasy.  His A Song of Ice and Fire series has pretty much set the standard for mature, well-written epic fantasy in recent years.  The first three books in the series, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, respectively, were published precisely two years apart starting in 1996.  Following the 2000 publication of Swords, however, everything slowed down.  The fourth volume, A Feast for Crows, did not appear until 2005.  Now, in 2008, the prospective publication date of A Dance with Dragons, the series' fifth book, remains tentative at best.  So the question remains: what happened to Dragons and, perhaps more importantly, what is going on with Martin's writing process?  More after the break.