I remember writing a letter to Monica Hughes in grade 5 because I really enjoyed her book The Faces of Fear, which involved a virtual reality game which allowed a girl paralized from the waist down to walk and run and move the way she had before a terrible accident. A boy she doesn't know is asked to be part of the experiemental game also, but the programmer has his own wounds to nurse, and the game becomes sinister and far more real than any game. - - - We also had to write letters to an author of our choice for some kind of reading program. Hughes wrote a lot of rather strange, sometimes slightly creepy science fiction. Stuff that made you think. Anyhow, I wanted to tell her how much I liked the book, and wanted to know if there would be a sequel, mostly because I just didn't want the first book to be over and done with :3 She wrote me back (on a typewriter, I believe) and said no, the story of the two main characters from Faces was over (it was sort of implied that they would eventually find each other in the real world). I think that might have been the firt time I realized that stories do not have to keep going on forever, that often they are better if they have boundaries (ie, not like those crazy, never-ending series' such as Animorphs . . . or the way Redwall is turning out to be . . .). Anyway, I was a little sad but I could see her point.
I was also super-delighted to get a letter back from her, because I was used to thinking about authors as far away and almost fictional themselves at that point in my life. So then I decided to write to J.R.R. Tolkien, because he was extremely awesome and I thought I'd better tell him. Unfortunately, he was also about 25 years in the grave. x(

(This sort of doesn't count, but I think it's cool anyway) I also once wrote an e-mail to Sarah Harmer, a Canadian singer-songwriter, about a song of hers which I was doing a project on. I was so surprised when she actually e-mailed me back, within a day of me writing to her! I was pretty convinced that she was probably too busy and famous to answer my peculiar little questions, but apparently not. Too bad I didn't think/have time to write her snail-mail style, or she might have written back (squee autograph /squee) So that presentation rocked, goes without saying. :D