An enlightened person is someone who shifts from one plateau of knowledge to another.
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal. ]
Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.
Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.
I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.
I know this is silly, it's shallow, it's bad, I wish I wasn't this way-but if I meet a girl with no teeth, I just don't want to date her. It's creepy of me, I wish I was a bigger person, but that's my real turn-off.
Like everyone else, I try to do quality work with great directors. But much of it has to do with luck.
Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.
The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.