The Hand of The King

Especially since I've been doing my Wiki project for "A Song of Ice And Fire"(as well as "The Wheel of Time", of course), I've taken to checking on the forthcoming status of A Feast For Crows, the long-overdue fourth book in the series. My hope was to be the first one on my friends list to scoop the news when it was done.

And apparently I have. It's Done!!! Sort of.

Basically, Martin has hit the same problem as other authors have before him, of having too much story to fit in a single book. He has elected not to go for the answer Tad Williams and/or his publishers chose, with To Green Angel Tower, which is to publish the paperback in two volumes. (Each of which was as thick as the first two books, really, so in effect "Memory, Sorrow & Thorn" was a tetralogy.)

Instead, he's going with Robert Jordan(and, I think, Steven Erikson). You know how the first half of Crossroads of Twilight was catching up with the ending of Winter's Heart? And how Memories of Ice and Deadhouse Gates have distinct subsets of the characters, and are both sequels to Gardens of The Moon?

In a nutshell(go read the links above if you want the details), he's pulling out all of the stuff outside of the Seven Kingdoms proper--Daenerys, Jon and Bran, basically--and putting that into A Dance With Dragons. A Feast For Crows will stick to the Seven Kingdoms, including this new Dornish plot thread he's apparently introduced.

I can't help but wish he'd done it in the reverse order. After all, the readings I heard from the work-in-progress were Jon and Dany chapters(and maybe a Samwell?); I wasn't that interested in new plotlines with new characters, for some reason. Now I guess I get to wait to find out about the characters I was really interested in. But I'm sure that I will find myself caught up in what he does write about. There's still Arya and Tyrion and Jaime, right? And now he's got the next book half-done already, so hopefully that'll come out sooner. He did say it'll stretch the series another book, but that doesn't worry me particularly.

No details on the actual publication date, but if they fast-track it, it might be before the end of the year, or early 2006. And Knife of Dreams is expected out this fall sometime, I think. I've got lots to read in the meantime, and no hope I'll get caught up on the Wiki before they come out anyway...

The Roof Is Leaking

Seen chez senji, the "iMeme", which I'm going to generalize to work with my Winamp playlist:

Alphabetically first track:

I'll skip the numbers(as if they were spelled out), so the first track is probably "A Bird That Whistles" by Joni Mitchell. (Because I don't have "A" by the Barenaked Ladies on MP3 yet.)

Alphabetically last track:

"Zone" by 13 Engines.

Number of tracks under a minute long:

61(out of 5594).

Number of perfect three minute pop songs:

18. I'll even list them ( behind a cut: )

Number of tracks over eight minutes long:

112. Though I haven't filtered out ones that are the last track on the CD with five minutes of dead space before the bonus track. Christ, those annoy me, and one day I'll use my WAV editor to fix them. (Not to mention that CD rippers don't seem to be able to recognize the "negative seconds" that are the intro to, say, Track 3, but puts them on the end of Track 2 instead. Makes most of the tracks I ripped from "Chef Aid" sound quite silly.)

The shortest track:

"Mr. Bubbunut Spills His Guts", from The Dream Warriors' "And Now The Legacy Begins", at 10 seconds.

The longest track:

"Mother" by Goldie, from Saturnzreturn. 60:07. (Beats out "This Dust Makes That Mud" by the Liars, which is half that length.)

Pick an animal and see how many track titles contain it:

I want one that'll turn up a few times, so I'll pick "dog". There's eleven:

Liz Phair:Dogs of L.A.
They Might Be Giants:Youth Culture Killed My Dog
Lisa Loeb:Underdog
Shriekback:Regret No Dogs
The Beatles:Hey Bulldog
Baha Men:Who Let The Dogs Out
Smashing Pumpkins:Annie-Dog
Paul Simon:Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War(two versions)
Garbage:Dog New Tricks
ZZ Top:Dirty Dog
Tori Amos:Space Dog(Live)

Pick a colour and see how many track titles contain it:

Let's try Simon's favourite colour, yellow. There's seven:

The Beatles:Yellow Submarine
Elton John:Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Alannah Myles:Yellow Rose
The Nits:Yellow Boat
The Innocence Mission:Bright As Yellow
Coldplay:Yellow
Rickie Lee Jones:Little Yellow Town

Next on Party Shuffle:

The next track on my shuffled list is "Change We Must" by Jon & Vangelis.

(By the way, senji, I did the book meme before you tagged me...)