Dragonwriter (6 page)

JOHN GOODWIN, president of Galaxy Press—publisher of the fiction works of L. Ron Hubbard and the annual Writers of the Future anthology—has been involved with book publishing since 1986. He is a board member of the Audio Publishers Association, a national organization of the audio publishing industry. He has become very active in the Hollywood community the past several years, serving as a board member of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and a board member of the Friends of Hollywood Central Park (an organization creating a forty-four-acre park over the Holywood Freeway). He is also one of the main organizers of the Hollywood Christmas Parade. He is a member of the Explorers Club, Science Fiction Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, and Western Writers of America, as well as the Dubai Press Club, as part of an international effort to introduce Galaxy Press' publishing program into the Middle East.

I
n 1969, as Anne McCaffrey's marriage was falling apart, David Gerrold's life turned topsy-turvy, and they found themselves talking long-distance: each consoling and counseling the other. Shortly after Anne arrived in Ireland in 1970, she invited David to come over, extolling the joys of tax exemption for writers and artists.

David came and found digs of his own not long after. And, in a case of reality being sometimes weirder than science fiction, he called Anne one day with the startling news, “Annie, Lessa is my landlady.”

Jan Regan, at five foot
mumble
and ninety pounds soaking wet, with dark brown eyes and long hair, was the embodiment of Lessa in looks and, it turns out, in character, too. Unable to find dragons to ride, Jan was an exercise rider for racehorses.

David has remained a friend of the family ever since.

ANNE MCCAFFREY REDEFINED
the term “Dragonlady.”

She made it a good thing—so much so that Terry Pratchett based a major character on her in his Discworld series. But before Anne McCaffrey was the Dragonlady of Dublin, she was also a pretty damn good science fiction author in her own write. And she had a singing voice that could crack mahogany.

I'll begin at the beginning. As I have noted elsewhere, 1969 was a particularly horrible year for me. It was the worst year of my life. I won't go into the details here; I'll put it in a book and let you pay for the privilege of sharing the horror. Two people saved my life. One was Harlan Ellison; the other was Anne McCaffrey.

I had met both of them in 1968. I met Harlan at a small Los Angeles convention in July. I met Anne two months later at Baycon, the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention, held at the Hotel of Usher in Berkeley. I rode up there on my motorcycle. Despite having sold a script to
that
TV show (the one with the guy who had bangs and pointy ears), I was still a skinny, awkward kid who had not yet outgrown various adolescent self-esteem issues.

I met Anne McCaffrey in the bar. In those days, the
real
convention always happened in the bar. I also met Frederik Pohl, Harry Harrison, Robert Silverberg, Terry Carr, Randall Garrett, Frank Herbert, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Philip Jose Farmer, Lester del Rey, Betty and Ian Ballantine, John W. Campbell, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Leigh Brackett, A. E. van Vogt, and almost every other author who had informed my childhood and teenage years with hours of wonder. It was better than Disneyland.

Anne McCaffrey was the secretary-treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

The SFWA had been founded in 1965 by Damon Knight. For several years, SF writers had been muttering that they needed some kind of organization. One day, Damon Knight sent out letters saying, “Send me five dollars for your dues.” And that was how the SFWA was started. By 1968, Anne McCaffrey had taken on the unrewarding duties of collecting dues, managing the membership roles, and publishing the newsletter. In effect, she was the organization. This made her the reigning queen of science fiction.

In those days, the only qualification for membership in the organization was that you had to have published a science fiction story. I asked Anne if writing a script for
that
TV show would count. She made an immediate executive decision that it did and collected my five dollars. Since then, membership qualifications have been made much stricter, but I do not believe that this was my fault.

Anne and I hit it off immediately. I can't say what the magic was—because it was magic. Magic doesn't work if you analyze it. But there were sparks struck at that convention that triggered a lifelong friendship. Anne was nominated for a Hugo Award; so was I. I sat next to her at the awards banquet. I held her hand when she won; she held my hand when I didn't. I celebrated with her; she commiserated with me. That cemented the bond.

In July and August of 1969, 1 experienced several of the life lessons that fuel much of the world's greatest literature. It is one thing to use words like
ecstasy
and
joy
and
horror
and
anguish
—it is quite another to experience those emotions and discover that words alone are simply insufficient. I'll say this much—testifying at a murder trial was never on my list of things I wanted to do. It's not a fun experience. I've had fun; that wasn't it.

But it was a turning point. Writers are people who process emotions into words, attempting to capture, evoke, and recreate those feelings. So if I had to pick a moment at which I began to shift from someone who just typed to someone who was actually writing something worth reading, I would pick the aftercrash of 1969.

The 1969 Worldcon was held at another Hotel of Usher, this one in St. Louis. Seeing Anne again reminded me of how much fun was still available in the world. Anne seemed to move in a cloud of white light. She glowed. She sparkled with fun and generosity. She made everyone around her feel loved.

After the convention, we kept in touch by letter, by phone call (very expensive long-distance phone calls), and finally, she invited me to visit her in New York for Thanksgiving with the McCaffrey-Johnson clan. It was an old-fashioned holiday, and the emotional nourishment was far more lasting than the physical.

In 1970, just as Anne was realizing she had to get out of New York, I was beginning to realize that I had to get out of Los Angeles. I was talking with Anne almost every week now. I don't know if she knew it because there was a lot I wasn't saying, but it was those long conversations that provided the emotional lifeline back toward sanity. Anne was going through her own stuff too, having recently divorced her husband, and was now working her way through her own emotional upheavals of relocating to Ireland with two of her three children in tow. So for a while, we may have been two of the walking wounded, holding each other up. Eventually, Anne invited me to join her and her family in Dublin—it would be good for me, and it would be good for her to have another friend to talk to, someone who understood writing. Thus began my migration, first to New York for six months (where I finished two novels) and from there to Ireland with a bit of change in my pocket.

Anne picked me up at the airport, and it was like coming home to family. On the way back to her digs, she said, “Let's pick up some takeout from the Chinese restaurant.” We walked into a fairly nondescript building, and one of the most beautiful Chinese women I'd ever seen in my life smiled at us and said, in perfect brogue, “Top of the evenin' to yeh! May I take yer arder?” It was the single most perfect moment of culture shock in my entire life.

I should also say this about Chinese food in Ireland—if they can't get the right ingredients, they substitute. Usually a potato. 'Nuff said about that. I leave the rest to your imagination. (That may have changed since 1970, though.)

A couple of days after I moved into the McCaffrey manse, one of Anne's local friends—Michael O'Shea—offered to take me and Anne's eldest son, Alec, out drinking. Michael O'Shea outweighed me by at least fifty or sixty pounds, but I kept up with him all day long, drink for drink. Michael's plan had been to “take the piss out of the American.” It didn't work. Knowing a smidge of biology, I also put away two or three glasses of water for every glass of whiskey. So when we got back to Anne's, I went upstairs to type a letter. Still pretty buzzed, I had to slow down to sixty words a minute. Apparently, my being able to sit and type, despite putting away so much whiskey, was enough to impress him that I was a force unto myself. (And yes, I admit, the hangover the next day was pretty horrendous. I haven't done any real drinking since then.)

I stayed with the McCaffrey clan for only a couple of weeks before finding a flat of my own in Dún Laoghaire (pronounced
dun laary
), a small village nearby where James Joyce had lived. It's the site of James Joyce Tower. There's also a statue of the man. I suppose that should have been inspiring, but James Joyce was not known for his science fiction.

Shortly after settling in, I called Anne to inform her, “You have to come and meet my landlady. She's Lessa.” Indeed, this feisty, no-nonsense, wiry little woman could have beamed in directly from Pern. (Actually, she was from England.) Jan was Lessa in looks and personality and that quality that western writers would call “gumption.” Anne met Jan and was immediately taken with her. It was the start of a lifelong friendship. Being in the same room with them was joyous. Standing between them was dangerous.

Ireland was the rest I needed, but it wasn't conducive to my writing. I'd finished two novels in New York City, but had made no real progress on anything while parked in Dún Laoghaire. About the time I realized I was seeking out Dublin's permanent floating John Wayne film festival, I knew my time in Ireland was ending.

I went back to New York, wrote another book and a half, returned to Los Angeles, and began the process of learning how to be a real writer—one who rolls with the punches and keeps on writing. But those days of sanctuary that Anne McCaffrey provided were the lifeline, the much-needed opportunity to discover the emotional resilience that passes for maturity.