Shortly after attending Clarion, I was bragging about it to a colleague. “All the teachers are published authors,” I said.
“Like who?” she asked.
I listed my instructors. She stared blankly. “What would they have written that I would have read?” she asked.
I’d mentioned award winners, a genuine New York Times Best Seller, and Cory Doctorow, who I was sure EVERYONE had heard of. He was in XKCD! Is there a higher form of fame? So I rattled off books – hell, Karen Joy Fowler’s “Jane Austen Book Club” was made into a movie so I thought that, at least, would spark familiarity.
“Well, I’ve not heard of any of that, so they’re not BIG authors,” my work colleague said. “But I mostly read science fiction.”
Thing of it is – those of us who aspire to fame want it to work like this:
But fame actually works like this:
It’s not linear – it’s exponential. To reach the level where a random person would recognize you as famous, you must be famous for BEING FAMOUS.
Warhol was wrong – the public mind doesn’t have memory enough to let everyone be famous for fifteen minutes. So… no sense fussing about it, is there?
