Dragonwriter

by Dragonwriter- A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey

  Fuck, my brain suggested helpfully. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Anne went on to patiently explain that her son Todd, who was very clever and a rocket engineer, had wanted to be a pilot when he was young, so he worked very hard. I think she shared a relevant anecdote, but I confess to losing it because my brain was stuck in a positive feedback loop of fuck, fuck, fucking, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  She ended with the maxim that no one gets anywhere without working hard, and then leveled the most direct admonishment I had received or would ever receive again: “So STUDY, twithead!”

  I began screaming. From her bedroom, I’m sure my mother thought I was being expertly murdered.

  I’d experience that feeling again eight years later, when Anne would appear where I had not expected her to be, leaving me to limp off with bruised shins and pride while she, the picture of poise, continued on her way with nary a hair out of place. She had a knack for that. Formidable people usually do.

  If I had gone to public school—if I’d been shooting up behind a mall, if I’d been touring with the Spice Girls, if I’d taken up underwater basket prostitution, if I had been literally anywhere else—I probably wouldn’t have discovered online gaming on December 13, 1997. And I probably wouldn’t have been expelled from Stuart Hall School on February 15, 2000.

  I couldn’t tell you now what got me wondering about whether Pern had one of those text-based “role-playing games” I’d heard so much about. But it was a Saturday, and I was bored, and I thought a Pern game might be fun. I suspect most meth heads follow a very similar line of logic. Saturday is probably tremendous for meth heads.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or if I would like what I found, but even in those days, I was adept at bending search engines to my will (AltaVista, probably, or Magellan or Dogpile—Dogpile was my favorite). A few tentative clicks later, Pern was real. Really, really real. As real as anyone could make it. It was a living place populated by actual people whose stories played out in real time—and I could be part of it, with a character who looked like me (but prettier) and talked like me (but cleverer) and did all that I would do if only, only I had a fire-lizard to perch on my shoulder, twin moons to light my way, and a warm and gentle beast who knew my mind and would adore me to our last inextricable breath.

  That first character’s name was Catalina. I named her for Jewel Stake’s rainbow-haired Saturnian girl on the tween sci-fi adventure Space Cases (I doubt anyone remembers it). To this day, my friends in Anne fandom insist on calling me Cat.

  What began as an innocent foray into a world I loved quickly ballooned into a full-blown gaming addiction. My already pitiful work ethic took a backseat to late nights lit by the wan electric glow of my hulking CRT, and then—when my in-room computer privileges were revoked—to increasingly furtive trips to the library computer lab. I learned how to circumvent what passed for a firewall in those days, how to confound the school’s monitoring software, how to keep playing even when the local host shut down for the night. The school’s sole IT guy was a well-meaning middle-aged man whose ineffectual tactics my defiant teenage know-how rendered wholly impotent. And once I got my friends to play with me, entire social schedules were coordinated around Gathers, Search cycles, and fire-lizard hatchings. Except mine were the only grades in free fall.

  Playing Pern certainly improved my typing skills considerably, and encouraged me to abuse synonyms like a dominatrix abuses vinyl (and bankers). There was always a friend to be made; indeed, many of the friendships I found in Pern gaming have endured to this very day. My imagination stretched to its utmost. I wrote, drew, and read constantly. But always about dragons. Never about algebra. Never about ancient world history. Even my boyfriend, already separated from me by a span of hours, had less of my attention than my computer did. The only people less thrilled than my teachers were my parents.

  Though I tried hard—I did try, Anne, wherever you are, I did—my studies fell by the wayside; my second and third years at Stuart Hall were not much of an improvement over the first. But by early 2000, halfway through my junior year, I felt that perhaps I was turning a corner. I was, after all, a fundamentally good kid who desperately wanted the approval of the authorities in her life. I tried to wake up on time. I tried to focus on my studies. I tried to be good.

  All that’s important for you to know here is that there was a crush (shared more or less equally throughout the student body) on a teacher; that this teacher had once been engaged to another faculty member, and that their wedding was canceled months before I was due to sing in it; that this teacher was now dating another, new teacher; and that the student body, being teenage girls, were all very interested in the nature of their relationship.

  I won’t tell you how I guessed my teacher’s email password, nor how many love letters my friend and I, conspiring over a library keyboard, read before guilt compelled us to withdraw. (Not many, and they were disappointing.) And I will leave you to infer the ripping sound my soul made when my friend, having left in some haste not long after our invasion, returned to the library to inform me, “I went to the front desk and told him what you did.”

  I will spare you those details. I will share only these three: that my will, hardened by the expectation of a brawl, shattered when my teacher asked me, simply, “Why?”; that my possessions were packed the next day, and I left without fanfare once night had fallen; and that my father interrupted the silence of the car ride home with some advice: “Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”

  I didn’t hear from my friends for months or years. Some of them never spoke to me again.

  After that I went (willingly) to military school—where I repeated my junior year—and did very well. I completed ground school and got about forty hours of flight training under my belt, but graduated before I could solo. I received a bevy of awards and honors, including Outstanding Cadet of the Year, the United States Marine Corps Scholastic Excellence Award, and the Order of the Daedalians Award. I made National Honor Society. I became very, very good at self-discipline, though I still had a tendency to forgo homework in favor of a little harmless role-playing. A not inconsiderable swath of dorm room wall was occupied by a poster of Michael Whelan’s unearthly “Weyr-world.” My McCaffrey books—perfectly arranged by height, series, and chronology—still retained their place of honor on my bookshelf. But my addiction was restored to the status of an esoteric yet largely harmless hobby.

  In the fall of 2000, the first year I was at military school, I convinced my dad (who did not need much convincing) to take me to the sci-fi convention my Pern pals had been gushing about for months. Though I’d never had any interest in conventions before—like most people, I assumed they were designed largely for the benefit of overzealous Trekkies and crater-pocked, grabby man-children—this one, Dragon*Con, had a whole track dedicated just to Anne McCaffrey. That was four days of nonstop McCaffrey programming. The mind boggled.

  We arrived without incident and found our way down to the Weyrfest room, where Dad planned to leave me while he went off photographing anything that would let him. There must have been a moment when I stood alone, nervous and feeling perhaps a bit foolish in the garb my mother had so obligingly sewn me, a sleeveless red dress and gold pants like the ones Catalina wore to Gathers. But that moment would have passed when my friends—strangers only because I had never seen their faces before—snapped me up in a torrent of warmth and welcome. And I knew I was where I should be.

  I’ve been directing Weyrfest for five years now. In the era of smartphone apps, highly graphical MMORPGs, and open-world console games, text-based online gaming—never mind reading—has more or less fallen by the wayside. Pern itself has not been treated well by video game studios; the TV series imploded when creator Ron Moore felt that it too was in danger of abuse. With the rights to Pern having again changed hands, there continues to be noise about a movie script—but the depths of pre-production limbo are vast and uncertain. There are many reasons wh
y Anne McCaffrey’s fans could have let their interest wane. In truth, many have.

  But many, many more have not. While 2012 was its last year before merging into the Fantasy Literature track, Weyrfest was as well attended as I’ve seen it in years—even without an Anne McCaffrey in the world, a world made chaotic by the dual evils of distraction and cynicism. Our attendees travel to Georgia from Texas, from California, from Canada, England, and Australia year after year after year, not because Dragon*Con is the only place they can talk about Anne’s books—the internet has long since negated trivial barriers like time zones—but because that’s where their friends are. Because it’s like coming home.

  Every once in a while I’ll ask my director’s second, Angelina Adams—a sweet-voiced buxom beauty with hugs that go on for miles, for eons, who I’ve described as “Weyrfest’s mom” and whose own essay you can read in this very book—what the response to our little track has been. While I do my best to be approachable, it’s a rare and bold person who would criticize an event organizer directly to her face. Yet I can’t be a good director if I don’t know what people are thinking.

  Seeing my concern, Angel will smile, and squeeze my hands, and say, sotto voce, “Every year, people tell me that they come here because this is where they feel at home. They’ve heard that we’re a safe place. Even if they’ve never read the books.” Then she’ll kiss me on the cheek and call me “gorgeous,” and I’ll beam and feel like we are the defenders of justice.

  For all of her imagination, her prolificacy, her tenacity, Anne McCaffrey’s fans are her greatest legacy. They are reflections of her fundamental goodness, her stalwartness, her belief in the power of mind over matter. So if her fans are motley and troubled and often a bit strange, they are kind. They are loyal. They strive.

  On the evening of November 23, 2011, newly dragonless, I crawled into bed and wept myself hollow.

  Then, when I had wrung myself out, I gathered my computer and a copy of Get Off the Unicorn. I set myself up in the trough of my boyfriend’s substantial eighty-pound beanbag, and I opened to the book’s only dog-eared page. I hit record, and I began to read: “Although Keevan lengthened his walking stride as far as his legs would stretch, he couldn’t quite keep up with the other candidates. He knew he would be teased again.” It seemed significant—sacred, even, in a vital, urgent way, to give voice to the first story Anne McCaffrey ever told me.

  I don’t know how I ended up contributing to this book. I make my living as a writer, but I write flyer headlines, product demonstrations, and company websites. As simple as those tasks should be, I’ve been fired from nearly every job I’ve ever held—“You’re very talented,” they always tell me, “but it feels like you’re somewhere else.” How could I deny it?

  Yet nearly every creative effort in my adult life, every piece of work I actually have cared about, has been, either directly or indirectly, tied to that very first story. Anne McCaffrey didn’t teach me to love writing; my mother and father did that. Anne McCaffrey didn’t give me a gift for writing; my heritage, my voracity, my teachers did that. And hers are not, perhaps, my favorite books in adulthood—for there are many, many talented authors in the world, and some have resonated with me in radiant, powerful ways.

  But Anne McCaffrey built refuges for dreamers. Her worlds are comfort food to aching, empty stomachs. They have been my solace and my friend. When I first applied for Clarion West, I named my story’s protagonist for her; when I try again (and I will try again), I hope to find a more suitable embodiment of her spirit. And this feeble little essay, every word of which has been a struggle and an agony, is also owed to her: it is my first as a published writer.

  One of the nights I was relegated to a hard wooden desk in the Stuart Hall auditorium, doing time for tardiness or mouthiness or academic delinquency, I opened the hardback edition of The Girl Who Heard Dragons. A compendium of short stories, its cover featured a lush scene rendered by the incomparable Michael Whelan, whose work graces the front of this book. It also contained a dozen or so black-and-white illustrations, each of which held my attention as long as or longer than the stories themselves.

  Of these, the one that struck me most was that of a dragon perched on a thrust of rock, her young rider’s hand outstretched in a wave—of beckoning or farewell, I have never been able to discern. Early last October, I walked into a tattoo shop to keep an appointment made at the height of summer. When I walked out again, a full-color version of that drawing was forever scarred into my flesh. That tattoo is my first, the culmination of years of earnest reverie. It is a reminder to me to take chances, to aim high, to see clearly.

  I hope, someday, it will follow me to wherever Anne has gone—and that I will find her there, that glint in her eye, as she shakes her silvered head and chides, “It took you long enough, twithead.”

  A northern Virginia native, CHARLOTTE MOORE is a copywriter and fangirl in Raleigh, North Carolina, a marvelous little city you should probably visit. By the time you read this, she will have turned thirty but still won’t own a house. She directs the Fantasy Literature track at Dragon*Con, where she collects autographs for her So Say We Wall of nerdy celebrity photos. Her blog, The Irritable Vowel, incorporates elements of copywriting and scatological humor, which aren’t as dissimilar as you’d think. She may or may not be an actual redhead.

  Janis Ian, like Anne McCaffrey, is someone who is best experienced. Back in the 1960s, at just fourteen, Janis had her first hit with “Society’s Child.” Since then, she’s won two Grammy Awards, become a well-established author of science fiction, and written children’s books. And she still continues to tour the world with her soft, beautiful music.

  When they first met, she and Anne hit it off, and they were friends forevermore. When life was getting Mum down, Janis was one of the people I enlisted in cheering her up. If there’s a hole in the universe where Anne McCaffrey once was, Janis is one of the people helping to fill it with her warmth, kindness, and spirit.

  The Masterharper Is Gone

  JANIS IAN

  I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens.

  —ANNE MCCAFFREY

  I MISS HER fiercely, more than I have any right to miss her. I remind myself of this whenever I run into her at the library and am stricken with tears. She was not kin, was not connected to me by family ties, not even a distant cousin. Not even Jewish.

  I have no right to miss her this much.

  And once in a while, when I chide myself for my silly sentimentality, the sudden lightning that pierces my heart gives way to a duller, deeper pain. One I can live with, perhaps.

  Like today, waking to a terrible cold, with headache and foggy brain I reach for solace. Put on my red flannel comfort shirt, add my favorite PJ bottoms, then a pair of fleece-lined slippers. Make my favorite tea, cover myself with an old patchwork quilt, and reach blindly for a book on my “comfort shelf.”

  Of course. I can’t escape her. Hours later, still miserable, I finish All the Weyrs of Pern for the umpteenth time and scold myself for the tears that fall—first, because she is gone, and second, because I never really succeeded in telling her just how much she meant to me.

  I’d never heard of her when I stumbled across The Ship Who Sang at my local library. I wrote to her, saying that it had moved me profoundly, wondering how a prose writer could have such a clear understanding of a musician’s soul. Being one myself, I said, a musician that is. And I would like to send you a copy of my last record in gratitude.

  She responded with a laugh that she had never heard of me but, oh my, her children had, and could we trade books for recordings?

  And so, we began. I raced through everything she sent—such generosity, so much that it took two large boxes to ship it all. She, in turn, told me that while she appreciated the beauty of my “Jesse” and the clarity of “At Seventeen,” she was writing her current novel to the beat of my one disco hit, “Fly Too High.”

&nbs
p; I laughed aloud because it made an artist’s sense to me—dragons flew, and Anne flew with them, regardless of the beat.

  It was the third or fourth email that she began with the salutation “Dear Petal.” Petal. Me? I responded that of all the things I’d been called, no one had ever dreamed to name me “Petal.” She answered briskly that obviously, they’d never seen me bloom.

  From that day forward, I was her Petal, and she my Orchid.

  We corresponded ferociously, both all-or-nothing no-holds-barred types, Aries to the hilt. Weekly, daily, sometimes hourly. Dropped out when one of us was “on tour,” dropped back in as we could.

  The time passed. Her beloved agent died. My parents passed away. She got a scathing review; I sent a few of my own. She was stuck on a chapter; I was stuck on averse. We got unstuck, stuck again, and through it all we talked, comforting one another as only a “good hot cuppa” can.

  She picked me up herself in Dublin, leaning on a cane, nervous to meet me in the flesh, until I ran into her arms and smothered her with hugs. She drove between the hedgerows with complete abandon, a total disregard for ruts or speed limits, while I clutched the seat and wondered who’d get the bigger headline if we crashed. Annie, I decided, for she was truly a two-column, bold-print kind of gal.

  By then, she was always “Annie” to me, or “Annie Mac”—my larger-than-life friend who consorted daily with dragons and starlight, her own luster never dimming beside them.

  Once, after she showed me the rock cliffs of the Guinness Estate and explained that Benden Hold looked just like that, she asked if I would write a theme for it. For the movie? I said. “Yes,” she said, “A theme. Because if Menolly came to life, it would be with your voice.” I say this not to brag, but to indicate the trust between us—such trust that when I got home, with no film in sight, I began sketching out some notes for “Lessa’s Song.” I wanted it to be haunting, the way her words haunted me. I wanted it to be sweeping, like the thrust of dragon wings. I wanted it to be everything I could bring to her, a gift for someone whose words took me out of my world and into hers.