(no subject)

Listening to the Quartet from the Sarah musical, and feeling wistful and like reaching out of my skin.

It makes me so sad sometimes that I have all these wonderful people inside of me, and no one will ever know them like I do. I have so many stories that I've never written down, that I probably never will write down; there are just too many of them. But I love them all, my people, my characters. They're real, defined and flawed and human, every one of them, and I love them. I wish...I don't know. I wish I could show them to other people, the way I see them, all of them. It makes me sad that I'll never be able to bring them all to life on tangible paper the way they are in my head.

There's Ryder Betancourt, my beloved Ryder, and her EmLynn, Alaine and Rabb and Rolan and Eland, dear Kin and Maire and Olem and Rachel and the others, Ivy and Andrew and Kenna and Miranda and Elderee and Lydia, and Maggie and Em and Dith, and poor tragic Savvi and M'lenn and Sess and Thea, and...the list goes on and on. There are so many of them.

They deserve better.

Dear Professor Tolkien, on the occasion of the Birthday.

Happy Eleventy-first birthday, Professor Tolkien.

And thank you. Thank you for your gift to the world, for gifting us with the genre. You started all this, and I have found my place in in, and I love it, and I thank you for it.

Words cannot express my gratitude.

In class a few months ago, when we covered The Hobbit, Dr. Silver mentioned that you went to war, but got pneumonia, and so was sent back early. It made me shudder to think of a world without Tolkien in it, a world where you never wrote Lord of the Rings and introduced epic fantasy into the world.

What would the world have been like without your contribution? For some people, much the same as it is now. For me, it would have been a much more drab, far sadder, far emptier place.

You gave us the gift of dreams. You gave me the gift of dreams. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Happy Birthday.