My interest in reading this was to see how he went about writing. I did read some of it (I 'owned' it in Adobe PDF form) before getting sidetracked, then my co

My interest in reading this was to see how he went about writing. I did read some of it (I 'owned' it in Adobe PDF form) before getting sidetracked, then my copy turned into a pumpkin when Amazon retired the Adobe DRM servers shortly after they introduced the Kindle. Anyone interested in Vinge's annotation scheme can get a sense of it from this interview with Norwescon [1], which includes a screenshot of his working draft for The Children of the Sky. Short answer: he writes in Emacs, and uses a convention to incorporate reviewer comments, annotations, and his own tags intermingled with the actual text, and has a set of text processing tools for navigating it. Edit: I just remembered a bit of trivia some readers might find interesting: there was a whole minor character he cut fairly late in writing, who survives in fragments 'commented out' in the annotated version. I think it might have been one of Ravna's fellow librarians at Relay, and he cut the character to streamline the storytelling. I think there might have been notes from his early readers supporting the decision too. [1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview.htm http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...