Jackie Collins

The Santangelos

She was a great writer of dazzling romance. No one wrote like her because she lived in the world of celebrity, money and power from a very young age, if not all of her life. Her death makes me not want to regret writing more. Writing as much as I can, while I can. I don't want the books I've written to date, to be my only books. 

I really hate when an author dies because of course that means no one will ever again read books by them ever. Unless all the author's books were written for them, which JC's were not. But this isn't about authors who have their books ghost written just to make more money, this is about the loss of a great woman, a great writer indeed.

Sometimes loss helps us understand things, inadvertently. I was at the store last night and I feel like I looked at a Jackie Collins book for sale on the shelf at the exact moment of her death, when I found out this morning that she died. It was a facebook status I saw. I don't recall seeing a new JC novel on the shelf for ages, so it was just a profound feeling thinking that she was on my mind at the same moment her life was ending, even though I wasn't aware of it at the time.

I didn't know her personally, but I read her books when I was younger. So we blog about people important to us, even though we could never know them personally as the celebrated people they are. I do celebrate her life, in my own way. I celebrate the books she wrote. I celebrate her author voice. I don't celebrate the fact she's gone though, of course not. It's sad when a writer dies, for me. I feel the loss of them like I did know them, because I'm a writer too and that means I feel the loss of new words they would have used if they'd lived on longer.  

Of course, Terry Pratchett died this year too. It's been a tragic year of author loss 2015 has. I can never read all books by every author ever, but I'm grateful for what they did write while they could.