Holy $#!^

So I come home from work and begin my daily morning ritual (shower, Skyrim, morning news check), and lo and behold, I catch sight of a headline on msn.com (my default homepage since I use Hotmail, now Outlook): "Author Tom Clancy dies at 66". And for a moment, my brain just kinda shuts down.

If you are the kind of reader who dives (or once dived) into the espionage/military/political thriller genre, then Clancy's name is likely very familiar--his best-known trait was spending entire paragraphs delving into the technological workings of nuclear subs and fighter jets, and even devoted an entire chapter in Sum of All Fears to the detonation process of a nuclear weapon. His first book, The Hunt for Red October, was first published in 1984 by the U.S. Naval Institute Press and turned into a bestseller when then-President Reagan gave it high praise in a televised press conference. In my opinion it is still one of his best works. His novels have over the course of his writing career served as something of a snapshot of America as it saw the end of the Cold War and a shifting of its foreign policy focus to terrorist threats from the Middle East. Debt of Honor's ending, seen as highly improbable (spoiler alert--a jet liner crashes into the Capitol Building and kills the vast majority of the sitting federal government--Congressmen, Supreme Court, and the sitting President) was an eerie forshadowing of 9/11 seven years later.

I read this guy's stuff throughout most of junior high and high school. His work, and Michael Critchon's, have had a rather heavy influence on my own writing style in its infancy, and I'm still working towards developing it into something more my own. They both died at age 66 (scary coincidence). And I see that headline, and think....

"Damn. I really am getting older."