I think a lot of the time these days people are so concerned about having the right camera and the right film and the right lenses and all the special effects that go along with it, even the computer, that they're missing the key element.
My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.
In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.
That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.
Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer.
I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.
Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.
