George R. R. Martin Joins Twitter, Uses Winky Face Emoticon

Photo: Nick Briggs/HBO

They said it would never happen. He said it would never happen. But George R. R. Martin is now on Twitter.

“I don’t tweet all that much, please check out my live journal [sic] page. ;),” Martin wrote in his inaugural posting yesterday, adding the hashtag “#myfirstTweet.”

Although the account is not yet verified, his publisher Del Rey Spectra has confirmed that the tweet did indeed come from the author of the novels that inspired the Game of Thrones HBO series.

The Twitter account may come as a surprise to fans of Martin’s long-running (and often hilarious) LiveJournal, which has served as his primary online home since 2005. In 2011, after hearing about fake George R. R. Martin accounts cropping up on Facebook and Twitter, the author took to his LJ to make his stance on social media clear:

I am not on Facebook. I am not on Twitter. I will not be on the next new thing to come along, the one that makes Facebook and Twitter as obsolete as GEnie and CompuServe and The Source, those halcyon communities of yore…I have neither the time, the energy, or the inclination to get on any of these social media myself. There’s WAY too much on my plate, and keeping up with the Not A Blog and my website are taxing enough.

So what’s changed? Why has Martin, like Ser Barristan Selmy before him—or if you’re feeling ungenerous, the Freys—decided to break his vow and pay homage to a new lord, especially when he still has book-writing deadlines to hit? More than likely, he simply wants to have the same kind of social media presence that virtually every other public figure has, and since fandom is his bread and butter it only makes sense that he be on as many forums as possible.

Yes, it’s been almost three years since the last A Song of Ice and Fire novel. Yes, he keeps taking on new projects that are not finishing the next A Song of Ice and Fire novel. Yes, it’s frustrating. But Martin says his tweets will likely be few and far between, and besides, there’s an odd sort of pleasure in imagining what an author who often has trouble limiting his book manuscripts to 1,500 pages does with only 140 characters.

Not to mention that it’ll finally put an end to to one of the more clever jokes about Martin: