(spoiler space)

I had dinner with GRRM on Friday night and then spent an hour
interviewing him the next day.  In person he is a short, round munchkin
with a frizzy grey beard, always wearing a cap and a novelty teeshirt
of some kind.  He's a lot of fun except when dealing with questions
that he finds hard to answer.

GRRM talked about why he originally was going to have a five-year gap
in the characters' lives between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for
Crows, and then changed his mind.  He had wanted the five-year gap so
that the child characters could get older.  (He said the child
characters are the hardest ones for him to write.)  But then he thought
about the adult characters such as Cersei, Tyrion, and others, and how
it was impossible to say "Nothing important happened in their lives for
five years," so he did away with the time gap.

The reason why it has taken so long for A Feast for Crows to be
published is because the tale grew in the telling so much.  GRRM said
he kept thinking of new things involving all the characters, and
finally the manuscript got too long to publish as one volume.  So he
decided to publish it as two volumes.  A Feast for Crows, which is
coming out this November, will be followed shortly by A Dance of
Dragons, which is almost completed already.

For the first time, not all the characters will appear in each volume.
A Feast for Crows will be concerned solely with the political intrigue
of Kings Landing; characters far away from there, such as Daenerys in
the East, won't appear in it.  But the following volume, A Dance with
Dragons, will be largely concerned with Daenerys and her dragons, and
also with events north of the Wall involving Jon Snow and his men.
Evidently there will be just a brief glimpse of Jon Snow and his men in
A Feast for Crows, and that only for the purpose of showing how Jon
Snow sends Samwell Tarly south so that he can study in Oldtown to
become a Maester.  Jon Snow foresees that he will need a new Maester to
replace Maester Aemon.  Samwell is reluctant to go, but Jon explains
the necessity to him.  Presumably, after Samwell leaves the Wall there
will be more chapters devoted to his training in Oldtown.

GRRM said the series will probably total seven volumes.  But it sounds
as if he is being flexible about that, in case he keeps getting more
new ideas that will result in additional volumes, as has already been
the case with A Feast for Crows.  He also said that the strange
phenomenon of the fantasy world's long seasons will be explained in the
final volume of the series.

GRRM said that he doesn't have a "Big Board" or a special computer
program to keep all the events and characters straight.  He says he
does it all in his head, by means of using the brain cells that most
people use to cope with everyday life!

GRRM said that his favorite character is Tyrion Lannister, and he
identifies a lot with Tyrion.  (Tyrion is also one of my favorite
characters; my other favorites are Arya Stark and Brienne of Tarth.)
GRRM said the Tyrion chapters are very easy to write, and they seem to
write themselves without any effort from him.

With regard to characterization and point of view, GRRM said that for
any character who is a POV character he has to find something that he
and readers can sympathize with even if the character in question does
reprehensible things.  He said there is always something he can find,
or if not then it just won't be a POV character.  Gregor Clegane, for
example, could never be a POV character, but Jaime Lannister can be
despite his bad actions, because there's more to Jaime than that.  GRRM
mentioned that Cersei will be a major POV character in A Feast for
Crows.  I was outraged by this and commented "You just won't ever leave
us any character we can purely hate, will you?".  GRRM smiled at that,
and that's when he gave the counter-example of Gregor Clegane.

I asked a lot of questions about the world-building involved in A Song
of Ice and Fire--why the fantasy world is so earthlike in certain ways,
with Caucasians in the northwest, Mongol-like Dothraki in the east,
black people and zebras in the south, etc., and why some of the
characters even have names from terrestrial languages such as Robert
and Richard (Germanic) and Philip and Jason (Greek); his answers were
that the earthlike characteristics of the flora, fauna, and ethnic
groups were just something he wanted--in other words, no real answer at
all--and that he viewed names such as Robert, Richard, Philip, and
Jason as "neutral" names with no real ties to any language, whereas he
would never give one of his characters a name such as Pierre because to
him that isn't a "neutral" name.  When I demurred about this, GRRM
became rather testy and told me my problem was that I knew too much
about languages.  (I still fail to see the logic in viewing the names
Robert, Richard, Philip, and Jason as any more "neutral" than
Pierre--they aren't, of course.)

The last question I asked him was about religion in his fantasy world.
I thought the religious tolerance in Westeros between tree-worshipers
and worshipers of the Seven was remarkable.  GRRM said there hadn't
always been tolerance, and the situation as seen at the beginning of A
Game of Thrones was a compromise that had been worked out after much
conflict in the past.  But this is a situation now changing with the
introduction of Melisandre and her fanaticism regarding
Rh'llor--essentially, religious tolerance is becoming a thing of the
past in Westeros.  When Robert Baratheon overcame the Targaryens, he
opened up Westeros to all sorts of changes in tradition--thus, Cersei's
unprecedented move in dismissing Ser Barristan Selmy from the
Kingsguard, etc.  Westeros is now in a state of flux.

That's about all I can remember.