One hard-won rule about fandom: never, ever meet the wizard

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/07/one-hard-won-rule-about-fandom.html

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Never, ever meet the wizard.

“Too late”, my bartender said.

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FACT: Cory Doctorow is 18 inches tall and always intended the sadistic authoritarian DHS officer Carrie Johnstone to be the central protagonist of Little Brother.

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Hmm. The headline appears to set up a cautionary tale about meeting the wizard, but the article appears to suggest that meeting the wizard can end favorably.

Gaiman had a neat little blurb on the subject, reprinted in “The View from the Cheap Seats”.

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Great blurb from Gaiman. I’d never seen that. It reads well along his piece on where he gets his ideas (though he is a wee bit defensive about dreams if you ask me):
Where do you Get your ideas?

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I’m also reminded of something he talked about more recently: Impostor Syndrome.

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She would be expanding the universe of her Riverside novels by working with Serial Box, a new publisher that wanted to be “HBO for readers,” producing serialized fiction in a structure and environment modeled on how TV writers’ rooms produce season-based narratives.

Because what readers have been saying about books is “Gee, these are nice, but isn’t it annoying that they are written by a consistent author with an unique voice? Wouldn’t it be great if they were written by a semi-anonymous committee like the great writing we get on TV?”

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hmm… I don’t have a ton of experience with it, but I once went to a Terry Pratchett book signing at a small bookshop around here where he spoke for a good hour before hand, and found him to be a wonderful person to listen to and meet… of course, I suppose at events like this, authors are still “on stage”

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reminds me of when i met cory and told him i’d been reading boing boing for half my life (I’m almost 30) - thought he’d be impressed, instead he was horrified at his own age… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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bOINGbOING has been around for nearly thirty years. You could be almost 60 and have read bOINGbOING for nearly half your life.

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Yep, I can definitely confirm this. Met a very famous fantasy author, listened to their interpretations of some other very famous fantasy works, and I was appalled by how incomplete and without nuance their interpretations were to the point in which I questioned whether he’d actually paid attention to the books at all.

And this is coming from a person who isn’t actually all that into fantasy, and who has only a passing interest in the books in question.

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