WILLIAM GIBSON: I do less, almost nothing in the way of deliberate research and regard my moment-to-moment existence in the world as being primarily emission of research. The looking for stuff machine is always on, and I don't have to monitor it. It's like those bug zappers in roadside restaurants. Occasionally, there's like a blue flash, and I know that that something's been caught, and that it will be in the hopper, and I worry sometimes that that's too memory-dependent, and that as I get older and my synapses come up with various things, I won't have that sort of recall, but so far it works. There's a certain stage in the completion of a narrative where I more actively but no less randomly start looking for missing pieces, and I have this odd faith that the missing piece will simply be provided. It'll be dialed in from elsewhere by the act of taking the narrative to a certain point and being unable to complete it, and at this point in my career, I have a lot of credit built up in that there are people who take some pleasure in providing me with weird bits and pieces of stuff. People who are sufficiently privy to the process that if they find something weird, they think, well, I'll throw this in Bill's hopper, and maybe nothing will happen or maybe it will emerge transformed by the weirdness of his process as something new in one of his books.