I’ve corresponded with David Drake about tanks, armored warfare, and a Sgt.'s-eye-view of the Gulf War.
I’ve talked with John Steakley over many a drink (in one night; the man can seriously imbibe!) about the military, my experience in it, etc.
This is seriously cool.
Thanks.
Sadly, the size of the audience for good Oliver Sacks/Henny Youngman crossover humor has prevented me from really cashing in on my talent.
I sent a letter to Phil Shilling, editor and author who writes about motorcycling.
He wrote a column in the now defunct “Cycle”… or was it “Cycle Guide”?
Anyway, the column was titled “Hour of Granite”.
He replied and told me that that article got more mail than any thing else he’d ever written. I still have a copy of it and I reread it from time to time to remind me just how fragile life can be.
CedricR.
Scott Adams; Joe Bob Briggs, aka John Bloom.
There was once a thread in GC that questioned the reckless zealotry of early Christians after the fire in ancient Rome:
When Christianity was a nutty cult
I did send Larry Gonick a note to clarify something and he did reply! But because the thread died, I never bother posting what he told me even though I had his permission.
I posted this before in an unrelated thread on Sci-fi god machines but it is better to have it here:
I’ve had a little correspondence with Russell Hoban. And I know Sherman Alexie, David Sedaris, and James McManus personally, so the regular correspondence I have with them may not count . . .
While I was managing a bookstore, I communicated, by phone, mail and in person, with many, many authors: JGBallard, Alan Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Larry McMurtry, Kaye Gibbons, Sue Miller, Ethan Canin, Donna Tart (who’s also a friend of a friend, so I’d met her once before she was a published author). . . . I even got a response from Samuel Beckett, a couple years before he died; he shared an editor with my teacher, James McManus, at Grove Press. Unfortunately, in the twenty years and probably ten moves since then, I’ve lost that letter.
I wrote Sara Gruen after reading her first novel, Riding Lessons, and got a very sweet, chatty note back telling me all about her next book.
I also wrote to romance author Toni Blake last summer, and get a reply every time I do. She is SUPER sweet!
Well I got a email from an author that I did not write to, Lawrence Ritter. Back in the early days of Amazon I had written a very favorable review of his book The Glory of Their TImes. He wrote an email to me thanking me for the nice review and would I like an autographed copy of a first edition of the book. Yup, I did and he sent me one. Pretty cool.
Douglas Preston sent my mother a signed copy of Tyrannosaur Canyon with a little dinosaur doodle above his name. I don’t know how many fan letters he gets from 75 year old grandmothers, but he apparently really liked hers.
I had lovely email exchanges with John Grogan, Paula Kamen (who wrote a very entertaining migraine book called All In My Head) and Matthew Kneale. One of them even sent me a book. 
I once posted a message to the moderated B5 usenet group a few years back, commenting on the apparent similarity between B5 and Lord of the Rings (which I didn’t mind at all).
It inspired a rant from Joe Michael Straczynski about how annoyed he gets when people say his stuff is a ripoff/tribute/nod towards some other previous work.
Hey, he totally responded to my email. That’s practically the same as getting a heartfelt hug, right?
I bought a couple of books years ago by an author I didn’t know. They were inscribed to someone (I forget the name). I posted on the mystery group on usenet that I had snagged the books for cheap and the author, Robert Crais, replied to my thread saying he’d inscribe them to me if I sent the books to him. Since I didn’t know Robert Crais posted there, it was a bit of a shock, but charming. Since then I’ve read lots of Robert Crais and have always been glad I picked those books up.
And after I read and loved the Daniel Abraham book A Shadow in Summer, I went to his blog to compliment him on the book. I said something about how I didn’t like reading series in progress because I didn’t want him to pull a Wheel of Time thing and he laughed and promised that it would be four books and only four books. I heartily recommend the first one. I need to reread it before I read the second one.
Andrew Greeley, not merely a clerical author of extraordinarily satisfying schlock fiction, but a serious sociologist. I once emailed him asking if the ‘guns on the mantle’ regarding Lucifer in his ‘Angels’ series would ever be fired. (He is getting up in years, after all.) I got a real and personal response being appropriately evasive.
I sat next to James Michener on a flight to Alaska during the time he was researching the book Alaska. We wrote back and forth everyfew months after that.
I also corresponded with Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) for several years.
And? What was the book name!
I found Crawford Killian online and wrote him about his book Lifter, asking if he’d ever had a different ending in mind. He sent back a rather detailed response.
See post #61.
The late, great Ed McBain. I emailed him explaining my mother was a huge fan of his and I’d been a huge fan of his all my life. He was nice enough to respond, and agreed with me that Leonardo Dicaprio would make a good Deaf Man.
I’m going to have to steal your life, you realize that, right?
I leave comments on Robin McKinley’s blog semi-regularly and she always responds. It never fails to make me smile.
The first three emails that I ever received came from James Gleick.
In the early 90’s I was working for a very progressive boss who told me he wanted me to procure and email address to put on our business cards.
I had read (in Wired I think) about a startup group in New York that was creating an FTP site which would have a companion program that would handle tasks like webmail and search functions. Graphical web browsing was unknown at the time and I was looking for something that the boss could light up and select action items vs plugging in commands himself.
In the writeup it said that James Gleick, author of Chaos was invoved with this new company. I wish I could remember the name of it.
In any case, the first welcoming email was sure enough sent from his account. The post looked to be a form letter message but I responded back and said that I had enjoyed Chaos and hoped that he had something else in the works.
I didn’t expect him to reply, but he did with a rather long post.
I sent him an email a week later asking about how one submits a book and he gave me a few pointers in response.
So, not only did I correspond with an author, my first email exchange was with a well known author.
Do I get some kind of prize now?