I was pleasantly surprised today to find that the fifth installment of A Song of Ice and Fire finally has a release date (I go to bed almost every night cursing George R. R. Martin for not finishing sooner). September 30, 2008.

There's even an excerpt from a Tyrion chapter at the Amazon page.

Am I just a geek that this is the high point of my month?

~Stef

I think I need to get my butt in gear and read this series. Now that there finally seems to be some forward momentum on finishing it! ;)

I might be more of a geek (in the loser sense, at least) seeing as I found out about A Dance with Dragons several weeks ago and knew that it was considered one of the hottest upcoming fantasies of 2008....yet have never touched any of Martin's works. So it's almost useless for me to remember such trivia!

I plan on tackling ASoIaF this summer, with some tall glasses of iced raspberry tea and a poolside deck as my environs of choice...

Victoria

Stef,

Don't get too excited yet. Previous installments were posted, with publication dates, and were not published until much beyond those initial dates. Martin says to look for definite information on his website, and it does not yet give a publication date. The website is just the author's name, with www. and .com surrounding it.

Not surprisingly... anyone who had a preorder at Amazon got an email today saying that the publication has been delayed. No more information than that.

I just checked on the website i order from and it said the release date is not until 2013 so i guess those of you haven't finished or even started reading the series will have a couple more years to do so.

From Martin's website, copied today:

"This summer I am scheduled to travel to Spain to speak at Semana Negra in Gijon, make some appearances in Madrid and Barcelona, and then head over to Portugal to visit with my publishers and readers there. I want to have A DANCE WITH DRAGONS done and delivered before I leave. If that happens, the book will likely be published in the fall of 2008 in the U.S, and somewhat earlier in the U.K. I am pleased with the way the writing is going at the moment, and I think these projections are realistic ones... but as you all know, I've been wrong before. So I am not swearing any blood oaths here.
I probably won't update this page again for quite a long while, so let me close by saying once again that when A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is finished, I will post that news here. The moment I finish the book, I will log on and make the announcement. You guys will be the third ones to know, right after Parris and my publishers."

http://sites.google.com/site/boycottgeorgerrmartin/
Nothing fancy, however maybe if the GRRM Fan Base joins together we can at least get a "Where" aDoD stands at the moment. Some news is better than No News in a year and frankly I'm sick of the Football and Spin Off stuff he posts every month also.