Compare that to Mike Diana, a young man in Pensacola, Florida, who did a fanzine called Boiled Angel which had his own comics in it. And they [the authorities] decided the comics were obscene. He wound up getting put in jail for 3 days before getting out. And in the actual legal case, he was found guilty of obscenity, becoming the first American artist ever to be found guilty of obscenity. This was about 2 years ago. And the penalty he got included a 3-year suspended jail sentence, 1,000 hours of community service, a $3,000 fine, a journalistic ethics course at his own expense and psychiatric counselling at his own expense. And he was not allowed within 10 feet of anyone under the age of 18, which considering this was a kid who worked in a convenience store was rather problematic. And to cap it all, he was forbidden from ever drawing anything that might be considered obscene again, and the local police were entrusted with the responsibility of making random, 24-hour spot checks on the place where he lived to make sure he was not committing art or doodling while on the phone or anything.

And that's why I've been actively working with the Legal Defense Fund for the past 6 or 7 years, holding benefits, doing reading tours, donating things to them. The most recent things are a video of me done by KCTS TV in Seattle as a part of a pledge drive benefit. And so KCTS gave that to the Legal Defense Fund. And I've also given them the Babylon 5 script I wrote, "Day of the Dead." They sell it on their Website and stuff like that. And that was one of those things that really occurred just because I got e-mail from lots of people after the episode went out asking if I could send them or post up the original script. I was going to put the script up on Compuserve, but Joe Straczynski said "Don't do this, don't put it up, because if you do, people will download it, print it out, and sell it for $30 or $40 at conventions as an original Babylon 5 script." So, I thought, "Well, fair enough, but I want people to be able to see this; why not do it as a Legal Defense Fund benefit?" So I annotated it, and Joe did an introduction, and people can buy it at www.cbldf.org. And everybody's happy.

It's probably a good thing that I didn't wind up committing to that, because it wouldn't have happened. On previous signing tours, I've gotten on aeroplanes and got to work. On this signing tour, I've gotten on aeroplanes and fallen asleep. It's been fairly murderous. Wonderful, though, and the sheer number of people I got to sign for was great fun. As was the feeling that I was getting away with something. I mean, here am I, doing a signing tour, and in every story I went to, I was either the biggest signing they'd ever had or easily in the top 3. And yet, on the other hand, I'm still one of those people who people ask, "Well, what do you do?" "I'm a writer." -- and they always sort of say the polite thing to writers you've never heard of, like "Oh, well, what name do you write under?" I get to be breaking records on the one hand, and on the other I still have this incredible amount of privacy. Except perhaps in Toronto, where things got very, very strange. Fans were actually coming up to me on the street and stuff. But normally I have the most amazing amount of privacy.

Whereas if you're writing with a fountain pen, you actually have to think about what you're doing. It's a different kind of process. Part of writing Stardust for me was wanting to write the kind of book they wrote in the 20s, before there was a fantasy genre. I didn't want it to be a genre novel. I wanted it to be a fairy tale for adults. So I liked the idea of the pen as opposed to the computer from that perspective. But also, I liked the fact that you write differently. You don't put down your blob of clay and then work it into shape; what you do is you think about it, and then you put it down. And also, of course, you end up with a very real discontinuity between your first and second drafts. I wanted that; I very much knew that with Stardust I wanted a first draft and a second draft as opposed to a rolling and improving first draft.

With a computer, what you end up with is a really, really good first draft. Or an ever-improving first draft. But there's never a discontinuity between the drafts. There's never a point at which you finish the story in the first draft, and a few days later you take a deep breath and started to type it out and change it as you go.

That was one of the things I noticed when I was editing The Sandman: Book of Dreams. We were getting a lot of short stories which read like 3,000-word short stories. They had all the rhythms of 3,000-word short stories. Five, ten, fifteen years ago, they would have been 3,000-word short stories. And yet they were 5,000 words, or 9,000 words. They just sort of bloated. Because when you have a choice on a computer of writing one or two things, you just write both of them into a single story.

I'm much less keen these days to throw myself into the wonderful wacky world of interactive stuff, just because I've lost so much time over the years to really, really cool and interesting interactive projects that never really happened because the economic pipeline and distribution still don't quite work. There was a point a couple of years ago where you had something like 1,000 CD-ROMs being released each month, and enough shelf space in the places that sold them to cope with about 14 new things each month, if that. And there were things that simply weren't even getting to shelves. One of the companies that I was doing a lot of work with was InScape, who did the wonderful Edgar Allan Poe "Dark Eye" project. They were real people. And one day their financing got cut off, and that was it.

Having said that, I've just agreed to work on a Sony PlayStation Neverwhere game. So we'll see what happens with that.