Anne McCaffrey and Me

I just remembered something from my childhood the other day, and I thought I would share it.  I started reading novels at a very young age.  I probably was ten or even younger when I read "Dragonsong," Dragonsinger," and "Dragondrums" by Anne McCaffrey.  I remember sitting on the porch at the beach and watching the fireworks around the forth of July and imagining the smoke left behind to be the detrimental silver threads that fell from the sky in the Pern universe.  That was so long ago now that I had forgotten.

Anyway, the memory made me start to think about what a big impact her novels made on me when I was young.  Her novels are part of the reason I started drawing dragons and partly why I became so interested in fantasy in the first place.  She might be part of the reason why I'm a nerd now (which is a very good thing, because being a nerd makes me very happy).  In essence, her work shaped mine a lot more than I realized, and it shaped me as a person more than I realized as well.  I'm sad that I won't get to ever meet her to tell her now.  I'm afraid there might be a lot of writers that I respect that I'll never get to meet.  And I feel bad that I honestly didn't even know that she had died until very recently when I found out that Todd McCaffrey is going to be signing at Dragoncon and that she had passed the torch to him.

Well, anyway, I hope that I can tell him this story while I'm there.  I think he would like to hear how much his Mother's books meant to so many people, and he might be interested to know that it inspired one little girl who's hoping to become a novelist one day herself.  Rest in Peace, Anne McCaffrey.  Thank you for your work and creating such a vivid world.