Thursday was a busy day for Mysterious Galaxy co-owner and publicity manager Maryelizabeth Hart (left). In addition to celebrating the “book mitzvah” anniversary of San Diego’s mystery/sci-fi bookshop at Comic-Con, Hart was also moderating two of the day’s hottest panels. In the morning, she convened a group of fantasy writers, including NYT bestsellers R.A. Salvatore and George R. R. Martin, to discuss the future of epic fantasy—joking about the sheer immenseness of Martin’s four-books-and-counting series, Salvatore quipped, “Do you have a whiteboard that takes up a wall of your house to keep all your characters straight?” No, Martin joked back, he lets the people who run his unofficial fan site sort all that out, then emails them when he needs to check up on a character’s details. Salvatore admitted to a similar strategy for one book which brought a supporting character in his series to the foreground. Having lost track of that character’s weapons inventory, he posted anonymously to one of his fan boards, asking what the character had and what it did, and pretty soon the readers had come up with pages’ worth of material.
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