Paksworld

Yes, I’m having one today.  It’s a double-digit, divisible by 2 and 3 and 11 and 22 and 33, which makes it a very fun number.   Rather playful.   Twice the age at which hobbits become adults (I should ask the friend who reminded me, on my 33rd, that if I were a hobbit I’d now be an adult.  “Am I?” I asked.  “No,” she said after looking me over carefully.  “You must be an elf.”   Needless to say, she and I are still friends.   I think I’ll ask her again today.)

However, that’s not the point of this, exactly.  The point of this is to consider character birthdays, name-days, etc. and hear what your ideas are about the best (or most interesting) birthday celebrations in books.   Right off the bat there’s Bilbo’s (I know, you were all leaning toward that one, but the birthday girl has one prerogative…)  But what other literary book-birthdays have struck you as being done right.   No restrictions on genre or age-range or anything…let’s enlarge the celebration.

One of the topics UK Editor suggested for a blog post for the Orbit Books site was “favorite fantasy dragons” with a lead-in to Kings of the North.    Those of you around in the great burgeoning of SF/F in the late 1960s and 1970s will remember that “dragons” were fairly common.    Some belonged to older mythologies  and some had been softened and tamed and made almost bland.

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