Ironically, my elderly father does the same thing today! He cold emails ivy league professors and writers from the WSJ, and I'm always surprised on how engaged they get with corresponding. They send preprints, lab data, and all kinds of followup.
At the time it was just a show run by a very competent host out of a public radio station in LA (KPFK - not an NPR affiliate). I think it has expanded since then.
Several times Ian said he was surprised to usually get a "yes" when he asked some relatively high-profile journalist, think-tanker, or university professor to be interviewed on his show. (Typical interview was 15-20 minutes of airtime - not just a sound bite.)
Basically, these folks seem to be surprisingly willing to chat when cold-called by an interested person.
The intern that answered the phone said "do you want to tell him yourself?", to which I quickly said "yes".
Jesse answered the phone, and I said "hey, Jesse Lee Peterson, I think you're an ignorant moron".
He replied back with "do you want to say this on the show tomorrow?" to which I said "absolutely". A producer reached out to me via email, and the next day I spoke to him on the radio for about 20 minutes. I doubt I convinced him or any of his listeners of anything, but at least I got to say my piece, for a lot longer than I thought I was going to.
While I still think he's an ignorant and sexist moron whose opinions have only gotten more radical and scary, I guess I'll give him a little credit for being a bit open to alternate arguments.
[1] Even if you disagree, don't try and convince me otherwise here, because you will not convince me otherwise in this case. If you don't know who he is, I advise that you don't Google him if you don't want to get depressed.
Took a lot of bravery for you to do that.
Regarding the risk of a minor doing this kind of outreach, 90% of all child abuse happens with someone known to the child and/or their guardian, and I doubt many of the remaining 10% are just waiting around for a child to contact them first. I'd say reaching out to people you admire is a useful enough skill that it's definitely worth honing as soon as there's an interest, though of course involving one's parents in the process is a good idea.
Think about it, most email is a pit of despair. Interesting human contact is rare.
Years ago I was working with a client on a really obscure bug with a storage system. I emailed a dude from the manufacturer who posted on an listserv about some similar-ish scenarios.
We emailed a few times and he ended up calling me. Turned out he was on the east coast for a conference an hour away and we ended up meeting up at the customer site unofficially, and he realized that whatever we were doing was outside of their test coverage in error. We both learned a lot and stayed in touch for a few years.
Absolutely didn't expect it, but it was really nice to get.
(Adrian Tchaikovsky, and his Children of Time series).
I really liked Cage of Souls, it was like a Jack Vance revival. And it's always fun to reach Tchaikovsky and Alastair Reynolds books back to back.
I've wondered the same thing about Stephen King. I figured it'd be easy enough for him to put out outlines and then make edits after others he trusted to write in his style wrote most of the words.
It certainly varies with genre, and the short writing periods tend to be more common in genres where people write series and the genre has very specific expectations (e.g. romance, crime mysteries) and where huge levels of originality isn't needed. NOT suggesting that is the case for Tchaikovsky.
I've written two novels, and when I first get myself to sit down and write (that's the hard part), I fairly consistently write 2k words an hour. A 200 page novel is in the 60k-65k word range, so 30-33 hours of writing.
If I could get myself to sit down and just write more consistently, I could churn out a lot too (of course whether it'd be good enough and/or commercial enough is another matter - most authors sell peanuts).
That ability to make themselves sit down and write with some degree of consistency is the most impressive part to me with authors who produce a lot, but that probably reflects what I personally find hardest (my second novel took three weeks from synopsis to first draft, and another four of editing; I'm now two years and 40k words into my third novel despite having planned the plot out in detail)
Also Dogs of War was good.
I know you're just making a CYA disclaimer, but that's not an effective approach to creating future adults. It just produces old children.
Good on you for doing this and hopefully your parents would have assisted you in staying safe (and polite) rather than stopping you.
I learnt a fair bit about music from some of these exchanges. It was good fun. A relic of the old internet says I guess. These days you’d just look for content on YouTube or something instead. Still awesome in its own right, but different.
In the same way kids should never go outside on a sunny day because there is an exceptionally small chance that they could be struck by lighting? Back in my day writing letters like this was part of the elementary school curriculum.
And what are they?
FYI: Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are) and to be afraid of strangers is wrong. You should instead be teaching them how to tell a good stranger from a bad one.
They’re in the rest of that sentence that you abruptly cut off while quoting, for some reason. You’re free to disagree, but leaving them out then acting like they aren’t there doesn’t feel like arguing in good faith.
> FYI: Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are)
Furthermore, this is incredibly judgemental to lob at a (presumed) stranger. You shouldn’t assume someone’s life from a snippet on a comment on a random forum.
You whole argument could have been distilled without attacks to:
> Teaching children to live in fear and to be afraid of strangers is wrong. You should instead be teaching them how to tell a good stranger from a bad one.
I think a t least some of the intense polarization, "culture war" acrimony, paranoia, and institutional dysfunction we're seeing today is attributable to the coming of age of people who were raised this way.
I agree that I probably should have clarified (and have in a few sister threads, you can find it if curious), but I don't actually think it's 100% analogous to say that being cautious when talking to famous people is the same as "don't talk to strangers". There's a pretty huge power differential between a kid and someone that they really admire vs some random stranger, and there is probably at least some degree of selection bias of people who pursue positions of power and have the desire to abuse it. I don't have kids, but if I did I probably wouldn't let them hang around a lot of people who actively pursue power completely unsupervised, e.g. basically any politician, religious leaders, etc.
You can call it paranoia if you want, but I think it's just being aware of selection bias; I probably wouldn't let a kid into an Incel Support Group for the same reason, because there's going to be selection biases towards justifying horrible stuff, even if a vast majority of incels are just dorky dudes who probably wouldn't do anything inappropriate to a child.
Most famous people are just average humans, and are perfectly professional and courteous, and I feel like I did at least kind of mention that in my original post when I said that nothing bad happened to me, but I don't think that implies you just throw caution to the wind and just let kids reach out to every stranger they want. I also don't think it's leading to a moral decay to think that parents should supervise very young kids on the internet.
Well I don't (and can no longer) have kids so there's not much risk of me teaching children anything other than computer science at a school, and considering that I was the one sending the emails before, I don't think that I'm "living in fear".
I mostly agree though, I shouldn't fear-monger, most people don't suck. I guess I was just saying that because I've seen enough true-crime and creepy Hollywood casting couch and child exploitation that I just felt the need to put a bit of a disclaimer. Obviously those are generally outliers (that's why they're noteworthy enough to make into a documentary or something), but I do think it's probably a good idea to supervise/monitor kids' outgoing emails, especially very young kids.
I don't think it's "teaching them to live in fear" to give some very basic safety precautions, but I acknowledge that I didn't make that clear in the original post.
When I was a kid I wrote letters all the time to anyone I met and kept up some good correspondences. I felt it really enhanced me as a character and grew my literary skills.
Anyways the point -- I'm sure -- is moot as no one does that anymore, I'll bet.
I will acknowledge that I was speaking a bit too broadly, I have clarified a bit in sibling threads. I do think it’s a perfectly reasonable precaution, especially for very young kids, to ask them to CC the parents.
The band members wrote back with a surprising frequency, and were extremely polite and grateful for fanmail. I remember that I had a fairly in-depth email session with Justin Pierre, the lead singer for Motion City Soundtrack, where I asked him about how he comes up with songs and what touring was like.
Now, obviously, there's reasons that kids should absolutely not ever do this, because there's a lot of really crappy humans who might try and exploit the kids or do otherwise horrible things, but I was lucky enough to where that never happened to me, and everyone who wrote back to me was very professional and seemed flattered that anyone liked their music enough to write a fan email. I think email was still a new enough thing to where most people weren't writing fan emails.
It's something I reminisce about occasionally, and while I don't really agree with any of Reagan's policies, I will acknowledge that him writing back to this kid was genuinely a kind of cool thing to do.
ETA:
Before anyone goes judging them, I should point out that my parents did not know I was doing that, and would likely have told me to stop if they did, precisely because they would have been afraid of me being coerced into something horrible as a minor. I don't think they realized at the time that it was even possible to directly contact band members via email.