Old but good interview with Ellen Ullman.

Aside from that, I'm working on a novel. It's about a man who's been programming for years and then encounters a bug he can't fix for a year -- what happens to him when all the technology that's been sustaining him stops working. It's set in 1984, year of the first release of the Mac, which I suppose makes it a "historical" technical novel. But I don't think anyone should wait around to read it. Novel writing takes even more time than software. And it's much harder to tell when everything "works."