Johnny Mnemonic, blogger

William Gibson, “cyberpunk” author of “Neuromancer” and the just-published “Pattern Recognition,” among others, has lately been posting his reflections, as well as responding to threads in a Gibson discussion group, in the Web log at his site www.williamgibsonbooks.com.

“In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google),” he writes in a Jan. 6 post, “I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.” Some excerpts:

Jan. 9, in a post labeled “Neuromancer and drugs”: “Yes, I did, rather textually obviously, take some of those, most notably LSD of the old ... variety, though that now seems a lifetime prior to the writing of Neuromancer. My drug of choice during the composition of Neuromancer, for the record, was O’Keefe’s Extra Old Stock Lager ... , employed primarily to manage the anxiety of composition, and not a practice I’d particularly recommend to anyone considering taking up writing. In retrospect, I’m of the opinion that writers who imagine they ‘use drugs to write’ really only manage to write in spite of the drugs they use.”

Jan. 17, in a post called “Why I don’t write short stories”: “Good ones are to novels as bonsai are to trees./Might as well go ahead and grow the tree./It’s easier to pay the rent with trees.”