Warp Wolf

Strange to think that I’ve known George R.R. Martin (seen here with Gwenda Bond) since 1979.  I was a newly-minted historical novelist with my first contract, and he was transitioning from his first career, as a greatly admired award-winning Analog writer, to his second as a writer of horror fiction.  After that came his career writing for television, after which came Career #4, which involved Game of Thrones and his becoming the World’s Best-Known Writer.

Those of you who missed Careers #1-3 missed a lot, not least of which was the message that, as a writer, you can have a lot of careers, some of them very successful, before you get the massive success that we all deserve.

George’s agent, Kay McCauley, was visiting Santa Fe the other day, and very kindly hosted a party for Wild Cards writers in the House of Eternal Return at Meow Wolf, the artists’ collective for which George is the landlord.  So there was champagne, hors d’oeuvres, heavy-duty literary conversation, and the most complex and erudite haunted house in the world.

Uh-oh.  Some serious warpage going on in the ceiling and chandelier, here.  Maybe better stand back.

It was a large party, but scattered out through the installation there didn’t seem so many people, so that when I explored the environment I did so nearly alone, only occasionally coming into contact with another human discovered in some deeply alien environment.  And sometimes these people would be friends from out of town who I don’t see very often, like Carrie Vaughn,  Diana Rowland, Caroline Spector, Mary-Anne Mohanraj, or Christopher Rowe.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt, the Dutch author of Hex, was in town along with the German author Marko Kloos, so I got to meet them both.

It was a chance to view the fine details of the place without having to trip over packs of children or their deeply bewildered parents.    This is a view of one of the arboreal environments, as seen from another arboreal environment.

I was able to play a tune on the fossilized mammoth bones without everyone else hammering on them.  I kept finding things and spaces I hadn’t seen before, and missing things I had.  I couldn’t find the laser harp at all, but I complained to Caroline Spector and she took me right to it.  Here she is making music.

I managed to get a strange minor-key version of Ode to Joy out of it, which was kind of creepy and also very much in tune with the environment.

So thanks to Kay and to George and to the Minions for a lovely evening.  I’d also like the recipe for the duck wraps.