I’m thrilled to announce that I’m up for two Aurora Awards this year! Fireboy is on the ballot for Best Young Adult Novel, and The Worldshapers is once again on the ballot for Best Fan …
I spent a good chunk of today at Wordbridge, the annual writers’ conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. My main reason for coming was to launch a Shadowpaw Press title (Broken Realm by Jenna Greene, a Lethbridge …
This is Easter weekend; last weekend, I sang in the Easter concert of First Baptist Church here in Regina as a guest soloist and chorister. The whole concert is worth listening to, but if you’d …
I put a link to this in the previous post on my Aurora-eligible work for 2025, but wanted to highlight it. This was my contribution to the Shapers of Worlds Volume V anthology, and it …
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s best-known science fiction and fantasy awards, voted on by fans every year. I’ve been fortunate enough to win twice, for Marseguro (DAW Books) (soon coming out in a new edition from Tuscany …
Put this under the category of “things I’ve meant to do for a long time”: I finally published (under my Endless Sky Books imprint) a new edition of The Haunted Horn, a modern-day middle-grade ghost …
Previous
Next
My dad always said I could be whatever I wanted to be…
…and that’s especially true of the Internet, where a false persona is only a few mouse clicks away. Witness this slide show of real people and the avatars they use in online games.
I don’t know what it says about me, but I’m more uncomfortable being anonymous online than I am being myself. I even spent quite a bit of time during my Second Life experiments trying to get my avatar to look like me.
I think it goes back to being a newspaper editor, and refusing to print any letters that arrived unsigned. You got something to say? Say it as yourself, or give me a darn good reason why you’re hiding behind a false name, or I see no particular reason to listen to you.
Or maybe it’s because I do all my dressing-up-in-costumes and pretending-to-be-someone-else on stage.
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2007/07/my-dad-always-said-i-could-be-whatever-i-wanted-to-be/