It’s been a while since I wrote something here, so I’m a bit rusty. But this is something I need to say, and hopefully something you need to listen to:

Find your heroes.

Simple as that. Call them mentors or teachers, parents or guides, I don’t care. To me they are heroes, people I look up to, people I want to emulate.

For a long time I had no idea how to do it. Isaac Asimov‘s dead. So’s Jack Vance. Ursula Le’Guin died a month ago. Louis McMaster-Bujold, Dean Wesley Smith, Howard Tayler, pretty much everyone I admire, lives on the other side of the world. And even when I knew Tayler was going to be in Finland, for the World Fantasy Convention last August, I put that aside. Didn’t have the time. Didn’t have the strength to chance it. Promised myself that I’d go meet them some other WorldCon. When I’d made enough money from my writing.

Wrong. Read More →

But there was a twist. Each attendant got a tag that tracked where they were in the room, and who they talked to. And it turns out that although every attendant stated beforehand that they went in order to meet new people and make new business ties, immediately upon entering the room, they made a beeline for old friends – and stayed there the entire event. If they did speak to a stranger, it was because the stranger was a friend of a friend. Read More →