One Thing I Know: Forget About the Pern Girls

During my twenties, there were two things I did a lot of: selling books and chasing girls.

I was very good at the former and really, really bad at the latter. But that's another story for another time.

From around age 19 until I hit 30, I spent a lot of time in bookstores. During this period, I watched a lot of people, and learned a lot about different "types."

The most confounding type to me was the somewhat good looking chick who would walk into the bookstore and throw off a major gay vibe right before heading toward the sci-fi/fantasy section of the store.

When this happened, the gay vibe disappeared and she suddenly seemed, if not scruffy-looking, then a little less attractive in some way which I was (and still am) powerless to name.

This is because I suddenly knew two things about her: 1.) she was straight, and 2.) she was weird.

And the straightest, weirdest girls had one standby as far as their go-to reading material: Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. The weird, straight girls didn't always like Anime (though a lot of them did), and they weren't all crazy about Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (though some of them were).

But they always, always bought goddamn Anne McCaffrey.

I was only reminded of these dark moments of my earlier life when I read that they're making a movie - probably a series of movies - from the Pern source material.