Follow Friday - Twenty-Six Is Only Evenly Divisible by Thirteen

It's Friday again, which means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - We Fancy Books and A Novella's Tale.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Name three authors that you would love to sit down and spend an hour or a meal with just talking about either their books or get advice on writing from?

Anyone who has paid attention will know that I love the Lord of the Rings and pretty much anything else related to Middle-Earth, so it should come as no surprise that my first choice would be J.R.R. Tolkien. I've read Tolkien's essays on writing and his non-Middle-Earth related stories. I have (and have read) Letters from Father Christmas, a volume that shows his intense love for his children and his far ranging imagination. I'd mostly want to find out what he thought about the body of scholarship and related material like David Day's Tolkien Bestiary that has risen up regarding his work. And what he thought of the Peter Jackson movies. I would want him to read Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon myths in Old English like he apparently did for some of his Oxford classes. And I would want him to talk about how he developed Middle-Earth and its languages and people.

My second choice would probably be Robert A. Heinlein. I certainly don't agree with him on every issue, but his influence on science fiction as a genre is pervasive. You cannot talk to a science fiction writer without them citing one of his books - usually Have Spacesuit, Will Travel - as their introduction to the genre. If I had a nickel for every time "the door dilated" from Beyond This Horizon is cited as an example of masterful science fiction exposition I would never have to work another day in my life. One of the early episodes of Star Trek was clearly influenced by Stranger in a Strange Land, and the episode The Trouble with Tribbles was clearly inspired by his writing. His five rules for writers are brutal, direct, and honest. And if I could get his brilliant wife Ginny Heinlein to join the conversation, that would be fantastic.

My third choice, and the only one of my selections who is actually alive, would be Ursula K. LeGuin. I can't think of another author whose range of work has been so consistently brilliant. She has written brilliant fantasy with her Earthsea books. She has written some of the most brilliant science fiction with books like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Her book The Lathe of Heaven has been turned into a television special twice - I'd like to know which she thought captured her intentions better. Her Earthsea books were butchered by the SciFi channel into an atrocious miniseries - I'd like to know what she'd do differently when licensing her books for media now. But mostly I'd just want to hear her talk about her writing.

Go to Previous Follow Friday: A Quarter of a Century
Go to Subsequent Follow Friday: Twenty-Seven Should Be Sacred to the Minbari

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