From Lileks:

It’s unnerving to see Darth Maul’s glaring face everywhere again, as if it’s 199-whatever again and our hopes are so very high, right up until the moment we read the opening crawl, and think – tax dispute? – and then see the guys who are obviously wearing crude ASIAN ALIEN masks, and then someone has to say “I have a bad feeling about this,” and so on. From the very beginning, in other words. Realizing you’ve waited all these years, and you’re getting a kiddie movie. Robot soldiers who talk and say Roger-roger. My God. If only someone had shot a time-lapse movie from the perspective of the screen, capturing the faces of the audience as they went from rapture when the Star Wars logo crashes on the screen, and stayed with the same fixed smile gradually fading away as all hope leached from their bodies.

I guess it would have bothered me more if I’d ever been a big fan. But I’m a 2001 man.

This always fascinates me:

For the entire book I’ve been mashing together two plots, making #3 a sequel of sorts to #2. (It’s not, but they’re tied together, like they’re all tied together, by the Casablanca Bar.) The two plots would not blend. There was nothing to make them mesh, at least nothing I knew. A while ago I got the idea that the main character would meet up with one of the protagonists of the late-40s noir novel, and he’d be a spry old bird who could set a few things straight. Imagine Bogart at 80, showing up in a sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.”

Well, he got to talking, and holy. Crow. He explained it all. He wove them both together, provided the motivation I’d been missing, and provided a theme and subplot for the sequel to the 40s-noir novel, “Band Box.” It’s just a bombshell. I looked at the page, walked away, came back, looked at it again, went to bed to chew it over, woke thinking: yes. That’s it.

It’s the best part of the job: you’re not writing. You’re just taking dictation.

Once in a while, someone asks me why I don’t write fiction. It’s because no one ever dictates to me. I have no idea where one would come up with character, plots or dialog. It’s a form of creativity and genius that I simply do not possess.