Some day, when from the luxury of my authorial Fortress of Solitude I can look back on this period of my life with nostalgia, I will have to read this book.

When I wrote the code samples that are in “The Bug,” I sat and then I thought, well, what would these connect to? And there I was, sitting at the MacDowell Colony, ostensibly writing the novel, and whole days would go by when I was just writing code. I actually had a little compiler on my laptop. Finally I thought, this is really a bad idea — code really eats up your time. I thought, I’ll never write a novel if I set something where I actually could write the companion code.

Which reminds me, I still haven’t finished the damn relativity calculator I need for the space opera.