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" When you're making a print book in 2012, I actually think the onus is on you - and on your publisher - to make something that's worth buying in its physical edition. "

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" People tend to think of the quest as a sort of fanciful or fantastical form, but actually, I think it's pretty realistic. I think that story of gathering allies to your side - recruiting your band of companions - actually matches the shape of most great careers, most great lives. "

Robin Sloan

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Side

People

" I want to learn to weld. "

Robin Sloan

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" For so long, the model for writing has been, you sit in a room alone for a number of days or weeks or months or years and figure it out. But now, you don't have to do that; you don't have to be alone in the room anymore. "

" Books are anchored. You return to books. You don't return to a tweet. "

Robin Sloan

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" It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways - and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways. "

" Whether it's 'Fish' or 'Annabel Scheme' or 'The Truth About the East Wind,' I often find myself crafting custom containers to hold the kind of content I want to create. "

" Without science fiction, without the influence these books have had on me over the years, I'm not sure I would care much about reading or writing today. "

" The stimulation I get from my phone does not feel like the opposite of boredom to me. It actually feels like a different flavor of boredom... a twitchier flavor. And sometimes, it's almost more irritation than stimulation. It's an itch. "

" We range widely, we readers of fiction, but I think we all need a home. Mine is science fiction. It's my home shelf, my homeland, my home planet, my essential genre. "

" Selling books is hard to engineer. "

" When you close a tab or when you finish an article on the web, it's gone unless you go back into your history or search for it or explicitly try to find it. Apps on your phone have this special property: they hang around. In some ways, they're more like a book on a bookshelf than they are like web pages. "

Robin Sloan

You

Phone

" I liked the sort of YA classics. I loved 'The Chronicles of Narnia.' I loved 'The Chronicles of Prydain' by Lloyd Alexander, who is amazing. Basically, 'Chronicles of' - I was in. "

" If I look into my past, I was definitely into inventors. I was into stories of Edison and Tesla and da Vinci and all these guys making stuff in their garage. "

" For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you're staring at the page and thinking, like, 'Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?' "

Robin Sloan

Good

You

" When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page. "

" When you've biked only on quiet cul-de-sacs and college campuses, the idea of riding in the city, right up there alongside the cars, seems, frankly, pretty absurd. "

" Primes seem to me to be these unarbitrary, unique, fated things. It cannot be coincidence that the mythical numbers of storytelling like 3, 7, and 13 are random. The lower-end primes have incredible resonance in fiction and art. "

Robin Sloan

Unique

Art

" Good writing is really meaningful, and it's one of the - it's still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people's attention. "

" What is a game like 'No Man's Sky,' really? A set of symbols that specify a world but do not themselves constitute it. A rich grammar that's inert without the trigger of human attention. "

" My parents live in northern Michigan, and every year, in the summer, we visit them for a few weeks. "

" A gift shouldn't feel like homework. "

Robin Sloan

Feel

Gift

" In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan. "

" For a whole year in elementary school, when the class marched down to the school library every week, I would refuse to return my book. I would just check it out again and again. Every week. For a whole year. The object of my fourth-grade filibuster was 'D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.' "

" Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness. "

" If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside. "

Robin Sloan

I Am

Window

" If you come from the Internet, as I do - I think of it as sort of my native country - there's a lot of great things happening on the Internet, but one of the things, one of the feelings you just can't escape is the sense that it's really hard to keep people's attention. "

" I think, personally - I don't know if other readers would agree - but reading 'Penumbra,' I detect an Internet writer or a writer who came up on the Internet. "

" I got a bike - a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can't let that stop you. "

" 'Minecraft' is a game about creation, yes. But it is just as much a game about secret knowledge. "

" A lot of folks focus on using Twitter as a marketing tool. They'll have a bump that says something like 'Tweet about the NewTeeVee show! Use the hashtag #newteevee.' And that's great - folks should definitely do that. What gets us really excited, though, is when they go an extra step and start to transform tweets into TV content. "

Robin Sloan

Focus

Step