Science & Tech Quote by Nora Roberts

Roberts is quietly puncturing the fantasy that bestselling novelists are fueled purely by candlelight, intuition, and some ineffable muse. The line reads like a casual confession, but the intent is strategic: normalize a working writer’s dependence on infrastructure. “Invaluable tool” isn’t awe; it’s pragmatism. She’s framing the Internet not as a shiny distraction but as the new desk, the new library card, the new long-distance phone bill.

The subtext is about legitimacy. Romance, the genre Roberts is most associated with, has long been patronized as unserious. So when she talks about “research” and “bulk of my communicating,” she’s asserting professional rigor in plain language. No mystique, no preciousness. She’s also signaling speed. Email compresses the distance between author, editor, agent, publicist, and readers into an always-on workflow, which helps explain how high-output writers sustain careers at industrial scale.

Context matters: Roberts comes of age in an era when authorship was still tethered to gatekept archives and slow correspondence, then watches that entire apparatus get rewired. Her tone carries a faint generational astonishment (“more and more”), but also an early adopter’s realism. It’s not “the Internet will change everything”; it already has, and she’s already reorganized her labor around it.

There’s a cultural tell here, too: the Net is presented as utility, not identity. Before social media demanded performance, Roberts is describing the Internet as a backstage machine that makes creative work more efficient, more connected, and harder to romanticize.