Where do you get your ideas? Do you work every day? What hours do you work? What sort of research do you do for your stories? Do you use a computer? What kind? How many drafts do you usually do? Do you show anyone your work before you send it to your publisher? And so on and so on, very little variation over the years. (Except that nobody would have asked you about your computer before the 1980s: typewriter vs. longhand would have been the more usual query.) Most writers, after the third or fourth interview, have the prefabricated answers ready even before the questions are asked. The one question that I've never been asked is about the most basic part of the whole enterprise: the desk at which I write. I was looking at my desk this morning—my dear old battered desk, which dates from the start of my career, which has been sitting there patiently in front of me for decade after decade while I've written hundreds of short stories and I know not how many novels on its broad back (and several hundred of these essays for this magazine)—and I realized that it has never had proper credit for its role in my career.
What do You think about Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013?
