You don't want your readers seeing easy connections; it becomes a distraction.

'It’s, like, one of them drug dealer boats,' Vic says, looking through his magic sight. 'Five guys on it. Headed our way.' He fires another round. 'Correction. Four guys on it.' Boom. 'Correction, they’re not headed our way anymore.' Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. 'Correction. No boat.'

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.