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Oh, man, this comic. I've met Orson Scott Card a few times and always had positive interactions with him, but I've heard other stories like this one.
I actually met my wife because of him. I used to post a lot on his forum, and one time at a signing I told him my forum handle.
He not only recognized the name but was excited to meet me. He introduced me to his wife, who was the forum admin. I couldn't believe it—a famous author was excited to meet *me*!
Afterwards I was gushing about it on the forum, and that led to a lot of us realizing that we lived in the same area and deciding to meet for lunch.
At lunch, I hit it off with this cute girl named Ruth. She wasn't a prolific poster but had decided to come to meetup anyway. She gave me her number, and the rest is history.
Anyway, the forum eventually became a pretty toxic place, probably in large part due to Card's increasingly toxic political and moral views. Today it's a virtual ghost town.
I'm not quite sure what my point is in all of this. I guess sometimes it's hard to meet your favorite artists and find out who they really are.
In my case he was nice to me in person, but I found out what he was really like in other ways.
Maybe it's a good thing I was never the biggest Card fan. I read the Ender series and a few of his standalone books, but that was it.
But even if Card is terrible, I met my wife through that forum and made a lot of friends there, people like @sakeriver and @DavidOBowles and @GimmeCommentary and @LabyrinthRat and @annekem and too many others to list here. Some of us still hang out in person when we can.
Anyway, be good to each other. The words you write can change people's lives both for good and for ill. I should try harder to make sure it's the former.
