Dragonwriter (33 page)

I can't talk about Anne McCaffrey without talking about Stuart Hall.

I had known since I was six that I wanted to attend the all-girls boarding school in southwestern Virginia, my mother's cherished alma mater. While my peers couldn't comprehend boarding school as anything but a punishment, I saw it as a godsend, a refuge from the torments of those same indifferent peers, from whom I often hid in Benden Weyr's secret passages, in Menolly's precarious seaside caves. Imagine my elation when I found Anne McCaffrey's name among the brochure's list of notables. It wasn't just a selling point. It was serendipity.

I loved Stuart Hall. It was there that I began to come out of my shell, built as a bulwark against the open scorn of my fellow adolescents. I had a role in every play. I took voice lessons and lent my ungainly mezzo-soprano to the school's small but able choir. I was one of the first students to enroll in the intensive Visual and Performing Arts program.

But I'd never been much for academics. There was too much other interesting shit going on outside the classroom—and even more, exponentially more, going on inside my head. Charlotte Moore is never where she's supposed to be, even when she is.

Pern was rocket fuel for daydreaming. I obsessively graffitied dragons on any piece of paper, any half-empty chalkboard, any virgin three-ring binder, that came within reach of my twitchy teenage fingers. Other girls were doodling horses or hearts in the margins of their carefully rendered English notes. My English notes were some halfhearted scrawls about how “The Awakening” made
me
want to walk into the ocean, followed by a dozen inept sketches of dragons dancing through the air, dragons belching fire, dragons peering into the sky. As much time as I spent practicing for my future as a liberal arts geek, I spent almost as much time doodling, procrastinating, oversleeping, neglecting homework, and feigning sickness to get out of class—which led to nearly as many hours sitting in detention (during which time I neglected still more homework in favor of reading and drawing more Pern).

The summer following a rocky freshman year, I sent an email to Anne via the fan page hosted through Del Rey's old website. You may remember it—it featured the winners of an art contest, news about upcoming publications, and even a fun feature where you could “go
between
” from one page to the next. It also included a contact form that, unbeknownst to me, was more or less a direct line to Anne herself.

I couldn't tell you now why or what I wrote to her. It was likely the kind of inane, nervous question you'd expect a fifteen-year-old fangirl to write; and while I don't remember the contents of the message, I remember writing it with heat in my hands and face, with a frenzied tremor in my fingers. I don't know what I feared more: that she wouldn't answer me, or that she might.

Some time went by, and as I plunged into summer, I more or less forgot the matter. Then one afternoon I opened my inbox and there, perfectly nondescript, was a reply from Anne McCaffrey. Upon seeing it, I did what any intelligent, educated young woman would do and promptly shit myself.

That email should have been printed and framed, but instead is lost to time. Here's what I remember:

Anne glossed over whatever question I asked her. Instead, she began by (politely, always politely) informing me that she had been in touch with Stuart Hall's alumnae director, a benevolent, broadly smiling woman named Margaret, who had taken a liking to the scatterbrained waif tearing ass down the halls. Margaret, Anne told me, had let her know that I was not giving due attention to my studies.

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 why Anne McCaffrey's fans could have let their interest wane. In truth, many have.