First up, HBO has found its Riverrun. With filming of Season 3 of the show now entering its second month, shooting is focusing on the ancestral castle of House Tully. Gosford Castle in County Armagh is standing in for the castle, apparently with both exteriors and interiors being filmed there.
Looks like an excellent match for the castle from the books, though presumably the Red Fork and Tumblestone rivers will be added later with CGI.
George R.R. Martin has also conducted an in-depth interview with the Spanish ASoIaF website Asshai.com. Martin's interviews for several years have focused on the TV series and very general questions, so it's good to see a plot and character-focused exchange like this one. Note that there will be spoilers for those who have not yet read A Dance with Dragons. In a separate interview Martin has also stated that he now has 200 completed and semi-finalised manuscript pages for The Winds of Winter, as well as a further 200 pages in draft form. This means that roughly a quarter of The Winds of Winter exists in at least an initial form, but given how the writing went on A Dance with Dragons it is not really possible to extrapolate a potential release date from this info.
The next A Song of Ice and Fire-related releases will be Inside HBO's Game of Thrones by Bryan Cogman (25 September), an insider's guide to the TV series, and The Lands of Ice and Fire by Jonathan Roberts (30 October), the first-ever canon collection of maps of the world of Westeros and Essos, approved by GRRM.
