I-Con

Springfield Illinois' Premier game convention.

Guest of Honor -

E. E. Knight

Short biography:

National bestselling, award-winning author E.E. Knight is best known for his Vampire Earth series, though he has also produced high fantasy and media tie-in novels of ill repute. His other interests include reading, movies, music, gaming, and building a cult based on the works of William Shatner. He resides in Oak Park, Illinois with his wife, three cats and several fearsome piles of books. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.vampjac.com, or ridiculed through his blog at http://eeknight.livejournal.com.
 

Glen Cook

Short biography:

Glen Cook was born in New York in 1944. He grew up in northern California and began writing while in seventh grade.

Navy background
Cook served in the U. S. Navy, spending time with the Force Recon unit of the 3rd Marine Recon Battalion. He has lived in Columbus, Indiana; Rocklin, California; and Columbia, Missouri, where he attended the state university.

Glen Cook wrote stories back in grammar school, mostly fantasy or science fiction. The first short story he remembers was "Hawk" which he wrote in seventh grade. It was about a Civil War battle, fought out west, seen through the eyes of a hawk.

"Inspired" by Lin Carter
While Glen Cook was in the service and at college, he put his writing aside and didn't really start again until he was working in an auto plant for GM. While Glen Cook was at work, he was reading a fantasy book by Lin Carter, and threw it across the room and swore he could do better. Glen Cook started working right away, using the company's typewriter and paper.

He attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1970, where he met his wife, Carol, and at age 26 launched a career that includes over 40 novels and numerous short stories.

Gritty epic fantasy
He writes comfortably in both fantasy and science fiction, but his fantasy novels stand out for their gritty realism and vivid characterization. The Black Company series is epic fantasy, but instead of being told through the eyes of kings, nobles, and courtly wizards, it portrays the horrors and victories of war from the perspective of the "grunts" in the front lines.

The Black Company series doesn't glorify war: it is just about people getting on with the job. The characters are real soldiers. They are not soldiers as imagined by people who've never been in the service. Most of the early characters were based on guys Glen Cook was in the service with.

New series from Glen Cook
Glen Cook is currently working on a new "what if?" series called the Instrumentalities of the Night. The first book is called The Tyranny of the Night. The Mediterranean is blocked and also severed from the Black Sea. Because of that, it is much shallower. There is also an ice age encroaching, which is making world sea levels drop dramatically. It is a fast-moving ice age where magic works. The political situation is roughly that of the early twelfth century with crusades and corrupt popes and so forth. The setting is what would be Italy in our world.

Glen Cook wanted to write a setting in which religion affected everybody's life. That would be the world in the twelfth century, where the Christians were extremely dedicated to Christianity, the Muslims were extremely dedicated to their beliefs, and the pagans in those parts of Europe that were still pagan were very stubborn about not becoming Christians.

Guests -

Shane Moore

Bio:

SHANE MOORE studied criminal justice in college. A police officer since 1997, he is also a veteran of the United States Navy and the starting linebacker for the Central Illinois Cougars, a semi-pro football team. Mr Moore has been a proud dungeon master of Dungeons and Dragons since 1985. In addition to his work in the fantasy genre, the author has aslo been secured as a writer for an underground comic book. When he is not writing or enjoying role-playing games, he spends his free time making pen and ink artwork and coaching little league football.

John Beachem

Bio:

John was born in Alexandria, Virginia, right about when Generation X came to a halt. A child of the eighties, he was raised on transformers, GI Joe, He-Man, and a great deal of fantasy and science fiction literature. At a young age he became fascinated by the works of Terry Brooks, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, and of course, J.R.R. Tolkien.

A true geek in the modern sense (not at all in the traditional sense, as his diet is limited primarily to pizza and fried chicken), he spent his formative years playing video games, role-playing games, and working as an armchair general. He has a great love of cinema, and has seen more movies than can possibly be healthy. His favorites include the works of F.W. Murnau, Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and the Brothers Coen. He has been called a film snob, and has not tried too hard to shed this title. 

In an effort to combine his love of cinema and his need to write, he worked for a short time as a film critic, but found that the vocation hurt his appreciation of movies, and abandoned it. Plus he had to watch Britney Spears in "Crossroads", and was irreparably damaged by the experience. His reviews can still be found over at Toxic Universe, and there are some fine writers still working for the site.

These days, he works on The Lorradda Stone series and various short stories a great deal of the time, and generally enjoys life with his beautiful wife, Michelle, and pair of mildly disfunctional felines. He resides in Denver, Colorado.

Elizabeth Donald

Bio:

"Elizabeth Donald is a writer fond of things that go chomp in the night. She is the author of the award-winning Nocturnal Urges vampire mystery series collected in NOCTURNE (Cerridwen Press) and numerous short stories and novellas in the horror, science fiction and erotica genres. SETTING SUNS (New Babel Books), a collection of her horror short stories, was published in 2006 and won the Darrell Award in 2007.

By day, she is a newspaper reporter in the St. Louis area, which provides her with an endless source of material. Her web site is , and readers can find out more by joining her YahooGroup at groups.yahoo.com.group/elizabethdonald.

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