Ray Bradbury 1920-2012. May your soul reside in the Universe's Infinite Library of Stories

Ray Bradbury 2009

Ray Bradbury died Tuesday at 91 years.  His stories and novels were among those that most influenced me in my preteens and teens.  Fehrenheit 451 is one of my all time favorite stories.  I also remember seeing a film about him in an English class in Jr. High and being so in awe of his office, his work habits and what he had to say about where he got his story ideas.  I already knew I wanted to be a writer but this cemented the image in my mind of what a writer's life would look like.

Bradbury received the National Medal of Arts Award in 2004.  Anyone who's encountered posts from the early months of Joystory know that I had issues with the previous administration but this was one thing they did right.

One of my favorite Bradbury quotes was made in 2009 in protest of the threatened closing of a local library:

Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

His first novel Fahrenheit 451 was written in a University library on the typewriters that could be rented for 10 cents per 30 minutes.  It cost him less than  $10 to write the 50000K story.  $9.80 to be precise.  That's 98 dimes or 49 hours.

What would he have made of the NaNoWriMo writing challenge?  Can you hear him asking "Challenge?  What challenge?"