Anne McCaffrey – A Great Woman Gone

I must be about the last person to have heard about this, but I’m still just as shocked that Anne McCaffrey is gone. Yet, at the same time, I’d consider myself fortunate to attain even a fraction of the fame she has gathered over her long life.
Dragonflight was the first proper novel I read, at the impressionable age of thirteen.  She opened my eyes in more ways than one and, though I’d already a love for writing and wanted to be an author, she made me want to better my writing. I’m pretty sure she also helped foster a deep love for dragons and the desire to have my own dragons flitting through the pages in whatever form I could find.
I cannot recall how many times I’ve read that one book. It appeared and disappeared throughout my younger life until I found the means to buy it. Let’s say enough that I can open it to select parts as the mood sees fit. Though I haven’t gone to Pern in a while.
There are still books I’ve yet to read (and buy), new dragons I’ve yet to meet and old dragons I’ve new stories to experience with. And I just know that, through those books, her memory shall reach out to me on those gossamer wings, as I hope it reaches to you all through whatever of her many books you choose to read.
Anne McCaffrey, it’s a given that you shall be missed, but may you never be forgotten.