Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.

I think every fantasy reader secretly believes they know how magic works.

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.