I was sitting here thinking "surely he didn't name his daughter after Ayria" for several minutes before I noticed the spelling was different.
The Game of Thrones books were the first books that made me think that being an author wasn't a loathsome profession. There's some real character development in there and a masterful control of plot. And hey - GRRM makes verbosity look good. Dude can make people sit through 1600 pages where 400 would do. And Arya Stark is one hell of a character. George RR Martin being George RR Martin, I actually talked to one of the producers on Game of Thrones to ask, yes or no, if he was going to turn Arya into, like, Hitler. I never got a response. So we decided maybe that wasn't a good idea, and her name was gonna be Mirabel, and then she came out with this ferocious frown on her face, and wee decided she was Arya.
