Time is a player. Time is part of today, not simply a measure of its passing.

She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t'aime.

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

I’m not club-able, you see. I don’t like literary parties and literary gatherings and literary identities. I’d hate to join anything, however loosely.

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.