Well, hello, everyone. This is Larry Dixon, of www.gryphonking.com . I've been around rather a while, as an ally of the furry community. I admire the fandom, its kindness & generosity, & I enjoy the work of many artists & writers in the Furry community. I have some material here I thought you might like to see.

I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the world's best creators, & I try to treat people very well. I am overworked, frequently injured, traveling & elbow deep in hot rods, screenplays, comedy writing, novels or rescue work.

I've worked on the Lord of the Rings & Hobbit films with Weta, had a hand in the Narnia gryphons & the design of Buckbeak for the Harry Potter films. I've illustrated or written for 60-ish RPGs since the 1970s, and have over 3 million words professionally published. I work behind a lot of scenes & only take a published byline in about 40% of what I do. I have been Guest, GoH, or Toastmaster for around 300 conventions worldwide.

I often work with Mercedes (Misty) Lackey, whom I married after several years of writing & illustrating books with her. In the 1990s I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to have some adventure novels in which gryphons weren't monsters or dumb muscle, but rather, highly intelligent viewpoint characters?" So, we did The Black Gryphon, which a lot of Furries love!

Mercedes Lackey & I are also race officials for the WEC, IMSA & F1 racing series. I used to be a semi-pro racing driver, running a Ford Ranger, Ford Thunderbird TurboCoupe, and Lotus Esprit Turbo SE, plus occasional spec racers.

I can be found on Twitter on occasion, as LarryDixonTGK.

*and it was recently confirmed that our books are why there are griffins in the MLP:FiM series, & yes, King Grover does look like me. :P

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+++++ I'd also like to say, to the artists here and to their fans, when I was training to become a professional artist in fantasy & science fiction, there were very few of us in the field. My contemporaries were people like Roger Dean, Brian Froud, Julie Bell, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Ned Dameron, Kelly Freas, Mike Whelan, and the like. It is to my astonishment and amazement that the very best quality work we few could do then is rivalled now by the quality I find on this site, and places like DeviantArt, except, on a scale we could never have imagined. There are hobbyists, semi-pros, and pros, here, that are as good as we ever were. It makes me smile, and I am so very happy for all of you. You are in a golden age of your own making. +++++
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