George R.R. Martin Offers Fans A Christmas Present (Not The Winds Of Winter)

Famed no-pages haver George R.R. Martin, author of the popular A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels on which HBO’s hit sibling-fucking drama Game of Thrones is loosely based, offered up a Christmas treat for fans over on his Not A Blog, which is a blog, today. Was it an announcement that he’ll finally be finishing the sequel to A Storm of Swords, which was published 16 years ago? No—Martin wants to point fans to a short story (which is surely very good) set in the Wild Cards universe (don’t ask):

There’s a brand new Wild Cards story up today on Tor.com. The title is “The Thing About Growing Up in Jokertown.” It’s from Carrie Vaughn, and it features two of your favorite Fort Freak beat cops, Rikki Michaelson and Beastie Bester, back when they were teenagers, long before they joined the force.

(You can read the story here.)

Martin, who has previously asserted to Deadspin that he in fact has pages, has produced no fresh pages in the ASOIAF saga in the year since he wrote a long blog post explaining that just months before he had been just months away from turning in pages. To be fair, he did produce pages about minor character Euron Greyjoy force-feeding his brother acid and then boasting about his plans to kill gods on his way to becoming one himself; however, those pages were old. Just over the past week, though, he has blogged about the New York Giants (that’s okay, I’m a fan too), announced a comic-book adaptation of an ASOIAF spin-off from six years ago (who doesn’t like Dunk and Egg?), and promoted an “enhanced edition” of A Storm of Swords, which was published 16 years ago and followed up on by a still-unfinished sequel spread out over two volumes. Where the new pages are—assuming they exist—remains unclear.