How do you prefer to read?

I go back and forth between e-readers and paper. If I'm at home, I tend to prefer paper books. There's no logistical hassles, and they can be read in any light, except total darkness, of course. If I'm traveling around at all, I'll use an e-reader.

You have 25 tweets since 2010 on your Twitter account. It seems like you start, you stop, you start, you stop. Why do you keep coming back?

We set that up when The Mongoliad got started. It seemed like we should have that social media presence. I didn't take control of it and start writing my own until a few months ago. I've put up maybe half a dozen tweets of my own since then. From now on, anything that shows up on that channel is going to be written by me, but I'm just not a habitual checker of it. It may be that I'm following the wrong people but all the stuff that I see is just gibberish. It's big, long strings of links to things that I don't really feel like clicking on because I know it's going to take me off to some website and I'm going to lose a bunch of time browsing that website or watching that video. If all it's doing is giving me links to other places that I might be interested in, it's not useful to me. I prefer people who tweet funny or interesting remarks of their own without embedded links. There are a few people like that. Matt Ruff does a nice job. I just don't go to Twitter that often, and because I don't go there that often, I don't tweet that often.

Are there other social media sites that you use more?

I follow Facebook. I have a number of people who I hear from on there, but I don't really use it. I don't have many outgoing posts.

Do you still read reviews of your books?

I tend to wait until a long time after the book has been published. Then, I go back and read a few. A lot of times, the publisher will put a bunch of them together and send them to me. I tend not to read them at the time the book comes out.

Alvy Ray Smith once said of you: "He's on the shy side. A strong ego, but nicely hidden." Is that a fair description?

[Laughs] I think that you have to have a certain kind of strong ego to be a writer. If you write things with the expectation that other human beings are going to read them, that's a certain kind of statement of self-confidence in and of itself, right? I think it's necessary to have a little bit of that in order to write at all, or in order to attempt difficult things. I would say I have a certain kind of stubbornness that causes me to do difficult things or things that make not work, and I guess you could think of that as ego.

Do you think you hide it well? It sounds like you do if you put that much thought into it.

Well, I mean, I guess that's for other people to decide.