What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

I wanted an agent who would actually sell stuff. After two British agents failed comprehensively, I was reading Locus (the SF field's trade journal) and noticed a press release about an experienced editor leaving her job to join an agent in setting up a new agency. And I went "aha!" - because what you need is an agent who knows the industry but who doesn't have a huge list of famous clients whose needs will inevitably be put ahead of you. So I emailed her, and ... well, 11 years later I am the client listed at the top of her masthead!

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.