"what no one ever tells you...
"What no one ever tells you, because we wouldn't listen anyway, is that contrary to accepted cliché, any kind of fame or notoriety doesn't actually change you. What it does, is to make you more clearly yourself. It magnifies the good and bad in you. In my case, fifty percent of me is smart, charming, self-deprecating, painfully shy but otherwise fairly nifty.
The other fifty percent of me is an idiot.
I'm not a people-person. Most writers aren't people-persons. Writers are writers because for the most part they're miserable, solitary creatures who relate better to the people who exist only in their own heads than they do to real, live, flesh-and-blood human beings.* The writing profession is a parade of eccentrics, weirdos, whackos, feebs, bozos, yoyos, yip-yops and crazies...and I'm not only marching in that parade, I'm carrying a banner and singing our theme song. Neither am I a public speaker, despite having learned a few tricks over the years to make it appear otherwise. The most common sentence I hear from friends is, "Could you repeat that, a little slower, please?"
The only time I'd ever tried even to read aloud a short story of mine - in Elizabeth Charter's Writing SF class at San Diego State University - she actually asked me to stop halfway through and sit down because I was so terrified that there was concern I might spontaneously combust and immolate the campus.
But the necessities of promoting Babylon 5 meant appearing at conventions all over the country, interacting with hundreds, and in some cases thousands of people in the same room at the same time. Because I had never stopped being the geek who in high school rarely spoke to anyone, and could barely talk at all to a girl, the idea of facing a room filled with people scared the bejeezus out of me. For three years, every time I went in front of a large audience I spent the half-hour immediately preceding the event in the bathroom, woofing my cookies in a state of absolute, unmitigated terror.
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*After all, why settle for second best?"
- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5: The Scripts of J. Michael Stracynski Volume 4, pg. 2.
The other fifty percent of me is an idiot.
I'm not a people-person. Most writers aren't people-persons. Writers are writers because for the most part they're miserable, solitary creatures who relate better to the people who exist only in their own heads than they do to real, live, flesh-and-blood human beings.* The writing profession is a parade of eccentrics, weirdos, whackos, feebs, bozos, yoyos, yip-yops and crazies...and I'm not only marching in that parade, I'm carrying a banner and singing our theme song. Neither am I a public speaker, despite having learned a few tricks over the years to make it appear otherwise. The most common sentence I hear from friends is, "Could you repeat that, a little slower, please?"
The only time I'd ever tried even to read aloud a short story of mine - in Elizabeth Charter's Writing SF class at San Diego State University - she actually asked me to stop halfway through and sit down because I was so terrified that there was concern I might spontaneously combust and immolate the campus.
But the necessities of promoting Babylon 5 meant appearing at conventions all over the country, interacting with hundreds, and in some cases thousands of people in the same room at the same time. Because I had never stopped being the geek who in high school rarely spoke to anyone, and could barely talk at all to a girl, the idea of facing a room filled with people scared the bejeezus out of me. For three years, every time I went in front of a large audience I spent the half-hour immediately preceding the event in the bathroom, woofing my cookies in a state of absolute, unmitigated terror.
------------------------
*After all, why settle for second best?"
- J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5: The Scripts of J. Michael Stracynski Volume 4, pg. 2.