Courtesy Boing Boing, I just read this interview with writer Neal Stephenson over at Slashdot. Ever since my cubemate Ben Ferrer at Sony Animation lent me Snowcrash, I've been in awe of Stephenson, who proved you could write science fiction without being a humorless geek. Go read this interview, his comic prowess comes through loud and clear, and he spells out some interesting truths about the profession of writing...



Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between them---hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer's conference. Because she'd never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer---one so new or obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.