The Coolest RSVP EVER!

Soooooo, I may or may not have invited two of my favorite authors to my wedding.

I may or may not have written them notes with their invitations saying I wanted them to know that without their books, Daniel and I probably never would have met.

And I may or may not have received a response from one of them last week.

If I did, it would look like this:

Honestly, Who Better to Fill One of These in Than an Author?

Personal Photo

It also would have included a gift of an entire book series, signed to us specifically.

The Great Tree of Avalon

Personal Photo

If that had happened, I might say that the author was awfully kind and thoughtful.

So why would I invite two famous authors to my wedding?  Well, when I started middle school, I was kind of over reading.  I loved books when I was little, but I was a lot more interested in cheerleading, dance, and gymnastics by the ripe old age of 10.  It was not until I read The Seven Songs of Merlin by T.A. Barron that I regained the love I had once had for reading.  After that, I was unstoppable.  And when I finally gave in to the hoard's demands and saw Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in theaters, I was in love, and that love was slow to ebb.

We haven't been through Daniel's and my origin story in a while, so let's recap, shall we?  Berkeley has a program called Decal that allows undergrads to teach full-on courses to other undergrads, and everyone can get credit for it.  Within Decal is a club called BookWorlds which teaches exclusively on fantasy and sci-fi novels, specifically on worlds that exist only in books.  My freshman year, I searched obsessively for a class on Harry Potter and found one my second semester through BookWorlds.  Our officiant, Nicole, was the lead teacher for this class, and since she and Daniel were friends, Daniel hung out in our class a lot.  We'd noticed each other, but it wasn't until I decided I wanted to teach that we actually got to know each other.  Three days of obsessive facebooking, AIMing (yes, it was that long ago), and emailing later, we had our first date, and the rest is history (some of it fantastical).

So you see, if I hadn't read Harry Potter, we never would have met.  And if I hadn't read The Seven Songs of Merlin, I probably wouldn't have read Harry Potter.  I feel like I owe the authors something for that.  I probably owe as much to J.R.R. Tolkien since BookWorlds would not have happened without The Lord of the Rings, but he's dead, so getting him an invitation would be tricky, and honestly, who has the time for that kind of thing?

The response/gift I may or may not have received from T.A. Barron was not completely out of the blue.  We've met.  Actually, he's met Daniel too though he doesn't really remember.  The first class I taught was on his Lost Years of Merlin series, and I asked him to come and speak to our class.  He obliged by meeting with us privately before a talk at a book store (in San Jose, funnily enough), and we've been in loose contact ever since.  We met up when he had an event in San Francisco, I told him about my sorrow of never getting to see Stonehenge up close (damn preservation attempts!), and I spoke in a documentary he was doing about kids and books.  He's a very cool person, just the sort of man I expected from reading his books, and it is entirely possible that I am actually his biggest fan (family excluded of course).

Now if only J.K. Rowling would get back to me... .

Did you invite anyone famous or someone neither of you really knew to your wedding?

P.S.  Rahm Emanuel was so getting an invitation before he left the White House.  Daniel is actually related to him, and while he's not really close to the family anymore, I was hoping to get White House M&Ms out of the deal.