"I've found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I've most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I'm doing this I'm definitely not writing a novel—that is, if I'm still blogging, I'm definitely still on vacation. I've always known, somehow, that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn't want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid's been left off."

—William Gibson on why he stopped blogging.

From THE MASTER:

"I took the family alarm clock and went into the spare bedroom that night, and set it for an hour and a half. And thereafter when I was working on a story I would waken myself every hour and a half through the night—force myself to wake up, think of the story, try to solve it, and even as I was thinking about it I would fall back asleep. And in the morning there would be a solution for that particular story problem. Now, that's penetrating the sub-conscious in my opinion. It's penetrating it in a way that I don't think they'll be able to do any better, thirty centuries from now."

—A.E. Van Vogt, 1979 via oivas



Slan, the masterwork of Alienation by A.E. Van Vogt, 1953 cover