xon wrote:
I have written some science fiction stories before, ranging from short stories to attempts at a novel. Once, I left a couple of my stories on a table in my dorm commons room to see if anyone would say something to me about them. No one did respond, so I can either believe no one read them or believe that they were terrible and those who may have read them didn't want to tell me that. Though school, work, and even my hours spent daily on WP have deterred me from starting any new writings of purely self-interest (except for one, a fictional treatise on the history of an mid-Atlantic island nation), I have considered that in the future, after I finish my computer science Bachelor's degree, I might write science fiction as a career. I would want to "test the waters" before jumping into science fiction writing, of course. One of my concerns about going into writing as a career, that is, with the intent to make money off of stories that are popular, is the fact that in most cases individuals with Asperger's Syndrome have difficulty in social interaction and, although it is by no means a requirement of social interaction that there be social interaction between or among any of the human characters, in much of the popular fiction today by such authors as John Gresham, David Brown, Nora Roberts, Stephen King, especially, and etc., it does play a very important role.
A question I have for you all is do you think that someone with Asperger's Syndrome can become a successful author even with his difficulties in social interaction, which may be reflected in his writing, especially in the dialogue?
Another question: Does anyone know of any successful writers who have or have been suspected to have Asperger's Syndrome?
EDIT: clarity
Having met Anne Rice, I would highly suspect that she has it. I don't even believe such a diagnosis would surprise her. I would also suspect that Stephen King and his wife both have it.
You don't have to be social unless you want to go on book signings. I couldn't do that since there are crowds, lights, noise and people handing you their books to sign and expecting you to talk to them. That could be difficult, but I think it depends on your place in the spectrum.
You just have to think about yourself in terms of publishing. How are you going to feel when an editor edits your work? What will you do if a publisher tells you to complete rewrite it to make it popular (or marketable). How will you respond if you are told it's marketable? These might not be issues for you because your motivation seems to be to get the work out there and get it sold. You want to make money doing it. If that is the core of your motivation, the rest should follow. My suggestion to you is to take Creative Writing classes so that other writers can dissect your work and help you to improve it. They can also help you with ways to get published.
My reason for telling you these things is that for me, publishing as a business is repulsive. Too much happens to work as a result of it being a business that I simply won't deal with or support. Having a professor and advisor tell me that I was the most marketable of the students in a Creative Writing class caused me to stop writing for two years. I destroyed everything I had written to that point. I still can't deal with that. It happened to me again about a month ago and caused me to stop writing what I was working on. I had tried publishing online and now I simply refuse to even look at it. To me, publishing my work has always been something I viewed as whoring my art and I simply can't stand that thought.
That is probably tied up in my AS, but it has much to do with where I am on the spectrum and my own personality. I avoid NT people and they really bother me, so when one says something like that to me, it indicates they like my writing and I take that as an insult because I don't really connect with them. As a result, I don't want them connecting with my writing. Does that make sense? To do that for money would be particularly repulsive to me.
That leads to the other reason I don't even try to publish (although I've written my entire life except for my two year meltdown) is because of the loss of control. No one in the United States reads the original version of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange because the entire last chapter was taken out in the U.S. when it was published. It has been that way since. You would have to know that and order it from abroad to get the original. That one publisher decision alters the entire meaning of the book. You can't read any original Emily Dickinson because it was all changed to make it palatable to the masses when her relative had it published. That is frighteningly ironic when you consider that Dickinson tried to publish a few times and stopped because she didn't want her work altered by publishers to make it marketable. Then, her relative turns around and does exactly the thing she did not want done. I could go on because this has happened to all published writers, but it would be more of the same.
So, it depends on motivation I think. You have to be motivated by money and approval of your work by others to want to publish. If you don't desire those things, you will be in for a sad letdown.
08 Dec 2006, 6:14 am
). If I were to list all the design things in and around the place I could go on all night!
I feel like I'm "stimming" myself here people... And it doesn't feel that bad 
Someone must have missed the metaphor about vintage routemasters in London - such are the symptoms of AS.
