Days of Ice and Fire

Last week I was fortunate to be up in Minnesota--in November? No, that does not sound fortunate at all, you say. But it was! Because I got to attend Fantasy Flight Games' Days of Ice and Fire convention, and the Guest of Honor was George R.R. Martin.

Now, I'm a writer whose first love is classic heroic fantasy, high fantasy. The kind of writing where half of the awesome is in immersing yourself in the author's unique world. Almost no one's as good at this as Mr. Martin. I've been fortunate enough to do some artwork for George in my other life as an itinerant miniatures painter, and this was an opportunity to meet him in person at last. So to say that I was terribly excited about all this would be rank understatement. (Below you'll see a photo of one of the models I painted for George; the 54mm Daenerys by Dark Sword Miniatures.)


Also attending were Wild Cards shared universe authors Melinda Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis, who did a panel on Wild Cards and its history with George. Ian is a newer writer who was just hilarious on the panel; I thought George might swat him when he described him a leering privateer captain kidnapping young authors into slaving away on the Wild Cards series. Melinda shared some awesome stories about how the long-running shared universe first began!

In their free time, Ian and Melinda were both terribly gracious and allowed me to bore them with questions on writing and discussions of my own painting hobby. Melinda also had some fantastic anecdotes about working on scripts for Star Trek: TNG. All in all, both were wonderfully approachable and enjoyable company!

George Martin himself was generous with his time, doing dinner with myself and fellow miniatures painter Jennifer Haley (you can see Jen's work here, on her website...she's much better than I am!) and hanging out after-hours with us and our host for the Con, Dark Sword Miniatures owner Jim Ludwig (you can see the Ice and Fire miniatures that Jim is producing for George here, on the Dark Sword site).

Finally, as they say, "pics or it didn't happen". Take a gander down below: from left to right, during the Wild Cards panel, we have Ian Tregillis, Melinda Snodgrass, and George R.R. Martin. Following that is a shot of me, Melinda, and Ian. Finally, in the last one the painter/miniatures crowd mugs for the camera up in George's hotel suite. From left to right we are Jennifer Haley, her sig. other Eric Kelley (who some of you from Viable Paradise may recognize, as he graduated from VP 13), George R.R. Martin, Dark Sword Miniatures owner Jim Ludwig, and myself, Anne Becker. :)

And now that I'm all inspired by remembering all that great discussion with awesome writers...time to run off and work on the NaNo novel!

Viable Paradise Retrospective

Like today's Mood Kyrie, I feel like I've been twisting every which way trying to catch up and get ahead with life after I came back from Viable Paradise 2010--was it only three weeks ago? Wow. It seems like months! Anyhow, I figure I should get my memories down before they get pushed out by worries, puppies, and to-do lists.

First off, I can't possibly recommend this workshop enough to any aspiring fantasy or science fiction writer. Heck, you could probably write chick lit or horror or mysteries and you would STILL get a ton of useful information out of a week with these brilliant people. I'm one of those writers with a large library of writing resource books, and some of the topics I was familiar with from those, or blogs, or forums. But in all cases, having an interactive discussion with a published author about them jogged my memory and caused me to internalize the techniques and subjects faster than I would have otherwise. I came out of this a lot more solid on my basics and with a greater overall conceptualization of how fiction hangs together and what being a writer means in today's world.

For me probably the most useful event was the one-on-one sessions, where pro authors and editors go over your work and point out the stupid stuff you somehow put in there and the things that didn't quite suck so much. You're assigned two instructors and can make appointments with as many others as you would like during the course of the workshop. You also get critiqued by five of your fellow students (and of course you're free to nab a bunch of the rest of them to get more if you would like!).

One of my instructor critiques was with goddess-editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden (click here for the lovely blog she and her husband Patrick write). I would honestly probably have paid an additional $500 just to have a couple more hours with Teresa one-on-one. In our hour-long session she took up her editorial pen and went over my manuscript line by line, explaining what she was doing as she went.

I swear, it was like someone just handed me the Holy Grail. All the little weaknesses in my writing sat up waving little neon signs saying "fix this here!" After that session, everyone else in the workshop could have hated my story, but it wouldn't have mattered one bit to me. It wasn't that Teresa said she loved my story. I didn't go in there looking for affirmation; this isn't a workshop you would ever take if that's what you wanted. She did say it was a weird little thing and that if I was going to write like this, she was at least going to show me how to do it right! But the real point is that the lightbulb went on in my head. She showed me exactly where my writing was, and the potential it had for improvement, in a clear, concise way that really hit me.

Of course, to other people, it probably just looks like scribbles on a page of type. But honestly, trust me here. It was abso-frikkin-amazing. I'm going to frame this thing.

So that was my favorite part of the workshop. Other highlights included John Scalzi's talk on managing money as a writer (don't quit your day job, folks), Laura Mixon's lecture on how to keep inspiration coming, and the three days of lovely warm rain we started off with, which made it so much easier to kick back with a hot espresso indoors and work on writing assignments.

I'd like to thank all the VP instructors and staff, and my classmates, for such a wonderful experience. I hope that I'll get an opportunity to run into many of you in the future. Though hopefully not in jail. Or in a cage on an alien ship. Or in a post-WWIII concentration camp for writers. Let's think positively: I'd much, much rather run into you at the World Fantasy Awards, when some of us are on the ballot. ;)

Good luck...and now it's time to crash back into the 2010 NaNoWriMo novel effort! Ciao!