I am generally way out of touch with trends, except now and then I am surprised to find myself leading one, like sympathetic vampires.

There are interactions with characters within the game which I think are pretty neatly done considering the limitations that you have to work with. I mean, a computer can't really generate a character that talks back and forth with you successfully.

I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.

Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.

Probably all the books I've ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.