Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

I can't speak for the other authors, but what I hoped to achieve was to illuminate certain corners of the Lucas universe that hadn't yet been explored.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.