First Day: GRRM is a local, so naturally he'd show up at the Bubonicon to chum around with all his pals in familiar stomping grounds. He's been making the stops at tons of cons as of late, most of the time reading chapters from the next book, The Winds of Winter. Well this time around he gave us the pleasure of reading a huge chunk of what he wrote for the upcoming book THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE, which is basically an encyclopedia/history book for Ice and Fire. He read for about an hour, a section on Aegon the Conqueror and the great battles during the earliest days of the first Targaryen King of Westeros. ...It was fucking awesome! It read very much like The Silmarillion, which I've always adored! Fake history, I love it! I can't wait for this thing to come out, in a year maybe? Before that though there is going to be a Maps of Ice and Fire book, which is due to be out before Christmas.
Second Day: GRRM along with all the other great authors had a massive signing season. I didn't bring anything for him to sign, but they did have the brand new 2013 Ice and Fire calendar on hand. So I picked one up myself and figured that would be good enough for him to sign. But where to sign??... I didn't want any writing done on any of the lovely artwork, so I thought, perhaps just having him sign on my B-Day would be a good idea... Now this is where it gets fucking WILD!... I flip through to the month of September, my Birthday being September 20th, and look down on the calendar and to my astonishment I see written in the 20th square: George R.R. Martin's Birthday, WTF!!?!!?!!! I mean seriously WTF?!! That totally blew my mind, that we would share the same Birthday, I've been a fanboy this whole time and never even knew that fact. Needless to say when I had him sign, I informed him on the coincidence, even showed him my license for proof, we had a quick laugh about it and he signed the calendar as you see in the pic, and in keeping with tradition, got ourselves snapshot with the man himself....
Third Day: ... And as you can see below we also got a pic taken with Brandon Sanderson the following day. So many things went on this weekend I'm not even going to talk about it all. So many great panels with people who really knew their stuff, featuring discussions about everything SF+Fantasy related, and the multitude of genres and cross-genres within. In addition there was also some discussions on hard Science involving, planetary science, archeology, environmentalism, even a bit of politics and sociology. It was a real 'brainy' 3 day event, it give me so much to think about in regard to SF and Fantasy as well as discovering many new authors and books to read.
