The Dragonlady

Above is a picture of Dragonhold, Anne McCaffrey's home in Ireland. 

Quote from Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Why did you choose writing as a career?

A: When I was a young girl I dreamed of being a ballet dancer, or a singer, or an author. I learned early on that I was going to grow too tall to pursue ballet. And later, as an adult, I realized that I wasn't going to make the grade as a top class opera singer, even after nine years of training my voice with a professional tutor. Now, I was always a voracious reader, and at about the same time that I realized I would no longer be pursuing singing as a career, I was reading a great deal of (as it was then known) "pulp" fiction. I felt that I could write better stories myself; tales where the female characters didn't cower in the corner while their "hero" beat off the bad guys, but got right in the middle of the fight, kicking and swinging along-side the man. So I wrote RESTOREE, which was first published back in 1967. Those of you who've read it will have realized that I was poking fun at all the cliched tales that had portrayed women as cowering whimps.

Many authors are friends with other authors.  One of Anne's friends was fellow science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov.