Dragonwriter (34 page)

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.

J
anis 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.

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.”