I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.

In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod, I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven't listened to in years.

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!

To my great surprise, Twitter is not housed in a silver pod that orbits Earth at supersonic speeds, vacuuming up and then dispersing digital bits of worldwide chitchat; it's in a big, bland office building in downtown San Francisco, near a bowling alley and an Old Navy.

That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank.

As our smartphone becomes even smarter, mobile technology should actually take the burden out of our daily lives.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Cars did not kill off horses. Digital publishing will not kill off books.