Intriguing mysteries and scalability

One of the best – and the worst – part of mentoring is that you really start seeing the authors as family members: you want them to do well, not just in their writing but in life in general. Most of the time this is amazing and the benefit is of course a friend for life. Sometimes this backfires as it did this weekend. John and I mentored what we thought were two good friends. I mentored the one that wrote poetry, John the novelist. They were good, entertaining and friendly. Suddenly a drama was to unfold, and a strange and initially plausible mystery started unfolding. We were incredulous but also genuinely worried because your dear friends seemed to be in trouble. John gallant as ever, and I with my bleeding heart dropped everything, sitting up until late at night trying to help. It was all, however, a joke, a practical and rather tasteless joke. Still makes me sad that such talent was wasted on nothing better than trying to impress and gain sympathy, which essentially was already there. It sort of backfired for the young prankster, I guess mainly because the person behind the one-actor drama only realized when it was too late that being a Bombadilian is not just about artistic talent, but about ideology, an open heart and trust. Now that there is no trust, or an open heart for that matter, the door is forever closed to that talent. Come to think of it, perhaps the talent was not as good as I had first thought it to be, because this young man, it seems, was unable to hold a consistent story line.

I am blogging quite late today, though not as late as Sara. The reason is that we went for a partner meeting in Stockholm to discuss scalability. I do not like coming up with exact numbers - I like estimations and trends - but after having heard of their importance for three hours, Niklas and I spent the evening getting them down on paper. As Niklas said, “these meetings are really good because we get an awful lot done – afterwards”. Well that too of course but the main objective of our partners is to structure us. And they are certainly successful. Structured we are getting – and scalable :-D And we are ready to get even bigger. Just look at the old picture of our office building and the domestic train just outside.. perhaps we will need to reinstall the train service so we can quickly get down to the village shop. Wow, wouldn't that just be so much fun!