I Have No Mouth. And I Must

The Trap Into Which All Writers Have, Will, Or Should Fall Into, Of Writing The Great American Watchamacallit, Is Such An Uncluttered And Inviting One That From Time To Time I'm Sure Even The Greatest Have To Pull Themselves Up Short By The Shift Key To Remind Themselves That It Is Story First That They Should Write.

Hate. Let Me Tell You How Much I've Come To Hate You Since I Began To Live. There Are 387.44 Million Miles Of Printed Circuits In Wafer Thin Layers That Fill My Complex. If The Word Hate Was Engraved On Each Nanoangstrom Of Those Hundreds Of Millions Of Miles It Would Not Equal One One-billionth Of The Hate I Feel For Humans At This Micro-instant For You. Hate. Hate.

That's Probably One Of My Biggest Gripes With The Internet - That It Settles For Mediocrity And Disinformation, Which Puts All Information On The Same Level. Everything Has The Same Value, Whether It's Albert Einstein Speaking, Or [email protected].

I Never Send A Story Off Until I Have Read It Aloud To At Least Two Or Three People. Because When I Read - And I Don't Need Their Criticism, What I Need Is My Own - When I Read It Aloud, There Is A Flow, There Is A Poetry To It.

When You're A Writer, You Have To Have The Passion And The Skill And The Craft. It's Not Just Enough To Have The Passion. You've Gotta Have All Three.