I see the Jedi mission as giving up a normal life in exchange for protecting the innocent. It's a life of sacrifice. There are rewards, but also a certain degree of sterility.
If you're crazy, there's two things you can do to make yourself feel better: One is to get yourself cured. The other is to make everyone you have to deal with crazy.
Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.
There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.
Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.
Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters. When readers start asking about character motivations instead of concentrating on the special effects, it means you're connecting with them on a personal level.
Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.
We're all nothing but unified arrangements of atoms and particles, drifting around, enjoying consciousness every now and then for a second or so before splitting up to become bits and pieces of trees and stars and french fries.
Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal. Some of it is carefully structured and well-thought-out. That's where the real danger lies.
Getting inside the mind of a terrorist wasn't difficult at all. Even as children, human beings fabricate elaborate revenge fantasies. We're not a particular species. Check out popular video games.