I never thought I could and never thought I'm an astronomer. Well, that kind of confirmed what I knew. You have an interesting story, but you can't write.' Guy calls me back two days later and says, 'Cliff, you can't write. And tell him about the story of spies breaking into my computers and the KGB and CIA and FBI and mailed it to this guy in New York. Spent like an afternoon and half of a morning - maybe almost a full day doing it. Write a sample chapter and mail it to the guy.' OK. You write a book proposal sample outline - write an outline of your book - 10, 20, 30 chapters - and mail it to this literary agent - this agent guy in New York City - and that's all you have to do. I don't know how to write a book.' He says, 'It's easy. Why don't you write a book about it?' I said, 'Come on, be serious.

STOLL: A year and a half ago I go to a friend of mine - an astronomer's walking down the hallway and says, 'Hey Cliff, you caught the spy. But also, afterwards, it's neat to just explore publishing land. And so for me writing the book was partly learning about how you make a chapter interesting, how do you develop a character, and how you say what actually happened in your life.

It was just fun to learn how all of these things interact. People start worrying what kind of binding should it have and how should the cover art work be designed and then finding that there's acid-free paper and there's this kind of paper. Why don't you throw it away?' Except for that they left it as is, and it was neat to see how at first the editor takes charge and it goes into production. They pretty much left everything intact and said, 'Hey, that chapter's pretty boring. I thought the publisher would sit there with the high-paid editor carefully going over every phrase that I wrote.

You'd expect - you send them computer disks with all your words already preprocessed for them - no, they want everything typewritten. STOLL: First of all they are not computerized.

The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll