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!