And writer crushes? Awesome.

More people here do than not, I suspect.

Writer crushes? You see any actors with their own threads here?

The writers are ours. They came to us. Our own. Our...

*cough* Yeah, we have big writer crushes around these parts.

Oh, yeah, I heart Lewis big time. I used one of his books on the synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian systems within Medieval Literature to analyze his entire Narnia series for a history of science course. Suprisingly, I don't much care for some of his other fiction. But I like his non-fiction excessively.

Yeah, I just want to have a cup of tea with him. You know that book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I've never read it, or even the comments on the covers. The title sends my imagination soaring, more than it grabs me to read the book.

Anyhow, when I see it, or hear it mentioned, I'm always trying to figure out who'd be on my list. Lewis is always there. I play games with it, though...like, "Okay, I wouldn't actually be 'meeting' Dad or Nana, because we've met. So I'd just be seeing them again. So, I still get to see all *my* people, and if I'm limited to five, it's just five new people. Right. Now I can meet five people. Okay, Jesus, Lewis..." and then I go off into a big fantasy about having tea with Lewis. It's a sickness, Buffy.

Cindy, you wanna hear my version of that madness? I have a Lewis quote up by my computer because I realized it's what my work-in-progress is about:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safely in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside heaven you can be safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.

I often wonder if Lewis would approve of a person like me using that quote for a raw, sexy feminist romance novel. But I figure if he has a problem with it, he can take it up with me once I'm dead too.

Susan, that's a beautiful quote. I'm going to print it out and hang it up on my wall.

The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside heaven you can be safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.

I had a feeling this wasa one of the places Joss was leading us to with S5 of Angel. Whether or not he was, it feels particularly apt to me.

Is it about how you die, so much as how well you live before you die?

In the Jossverse I'd say it's also about what happens after you die, which is the crux of my argument. We know there is an afterlife, but Fred—perhaps uniquely among human beings—doesn't get one. Or if the best authority on the process is wrong, then what Fred gets is for little rotted shards of her self-awareness to exist forever mired in the midst of Illyria's far vaster self.