The professionals are going to be joined by the average Joe. Everybody's a publisher.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.

You don't have to fight for your life anymore. You're starting a new one.

For me, my 20s were all about reaching for the brass ring of work in theater, television, and film, surviving in between by waiting tables, painting houses, serving coffee, and temping.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.

Surf music at the time that I did it wasn't mainstream, nor were the Cheech and Chong albums. The risk comes from having the ability to do something that hadn't been done before that I thought was either interesting as an art form or just should be done.

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.