Dragonwriter by Todd McCaffrey Page A

open.) We ate roast wherry (turkey) and homemade bubbly pies and sang late into the night, led by the Weyrsinger who played the guitar. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t hooked yet.
    Toward the end of the weekend, someone handed me the club’s little ten-page newsletter called the Harper Beat. It was created by pasting text onto eleven-by-seventeen-inch paper, photocopying it, and folding it in half, so it created a booklet. One page was a report from the Weyrwoman, who was the club’s founder and president. The vice president was the Weyrleader, and his report was called Kreelings. They talked about club memberships and activities and their daily lives. I ignored those two columns. What hooked me was that the rest of the newsletter was a story. Eight pages of fluff from the Weyrsinger filled with everything I loved about Pern. The dragons. The fire-lizards. The weyr.
    â€œJune says you write. Why don’t you write something for the newsletter?”
    I had never considered writing fanfic before. I had no desire to create stories set in someone else’s world. The fan club, though, offered two things I couldn’t resist: an editor and an audience.
    They explained Anne’s rules to me. At the time you couldn’t use any of Anne’s characters nor could you set any story in Benden Weyr. A club whose members were air force pilots with “silver dragons” triggered a rule that only Anne’s standard five colors could be used. Men couldn’t ride gold dragons and women weren’t allowed to ride bronzes. And of course, we weren’t allowed to sell our fiction.
    I sat down and tried to write the persona I had used all weekend. He was a brown rider from another weyr. His weyr-mate had recently died, and his grief had caused him to come in conflict with his wingleader. The trouble had escalated to a knife fight. He’d won the fight only to be transferred out before more trouble could follow. He was an angst-ridden, battered man. I wrote him coming to the new weyr and handed the “story” to the editor, Julia Ecklar. (Yes, the club fostered two John Campbell award winners. Julia won the award in 1991, and I won in 2003.)
    â€œIt’s nice,” she said in a tone that clearly meant that it was barely acceptable. “It’s just not a real story. It’s a vignette.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œVignette. Slice of life. A story is when a hero has a problem. See, in my story, the Weyrsinger discovers the problem in the first scene. In the second scene, he attempts to fix the problem and only makes it worse. Third scene, he attempts again and fails. Fourth scene, he resolves the problem. That’s a story. I’m practicing telling a story with only four scenes, but you can take more.”
    This triggered a great deal of rereading famous SF short stories to verify that she was completely correct. (Her method of limiting the number of scenes turns out to be a great way to focus on what a scene is about and why you’re writing it.)
    Well, I couldn’t wrap my brain around what kind of difficulties would face a middle-age widower bonded to an animal the size of a small jet. I was twenty-one and still working on the whole first serious boyfriend thing. I scrapped the brown rider and came up with a new character, one whose problems would be easier to grasp. His name was Zachafiddel, but he was nicknamed Zac. He was a twelve-year-old apprentice beast herder who took care of the flocks of wherries that the dragons fed on. He was new to the weyr, ignorant of how things worked, and had an abusive journeyman.
    I wrote up a short story and sat nervously as Julia read it. After a few minutes, she sighed and handed it back. “It’s still a vignette.”
    It took two more attempts before I grasped “story.” The newsletter was published every other month, so I managed to write six stories before the next annual Gather. I basked in the glow of