In Mourning

The day before yesterday my world fell out from underneath me.  I had heard that my most favorite (of all time and until forever) writer had passed away.  It was a shock, which is ridiculous because I knew how old he was, it had actually been weighing on me the last time I had read one of his books, We'll Always Have Paris.  Ray Bradbury died at age 91 after more than seventy years of working on his craft, performing magic tricks with words, and working  on living forever in the only way he knew how.

It's sad, and maybe a little strange, for me to be mourning someone I have never met, but I have felt so connected to Ray since the first book of his I ever read.  His writing impacted me so deeply that over the years I have sought everything he had ever put into books, every one of his stories had such depth and resonance, that I truly felt he had no equal, and that he was, as I fondly put it The King of Short Stories.  
 I have chosen to deal with this grief in two ways:  I have started buying up all of the books I don't yet have of his (though I have read them all) which I plan on re-reading, and I have begun to write again.    

Ray always said to write every day, wether you felt like it or not.  Not that I consider myself a writer in any good form, I will never write my own novel, or even a short story, I don't have the gift, but I do love to write.  Unfortunately, I don't have the drive I wish I had to do it on a daily basis.  I go for long periods of time where I am just not in a sharing mood (even in my personal journal), where whatever is happening in my life is just too hard to write about, or I am just so mentally exhausted that I don't have the strength to think too hard about my life.  It's sad because this is something I love to do. 

So to honor Ray I am going to give the writing thing an earnest try.  I have been shocked out of my writing funk, and it feels like an expression of love to one I have lost to begin writing,  sharing my love of all things bookish and the written word with you.