Science & Tech Quote by Lynn Abbey

Abbey’s line is a neat self-portrait of a mind that refuses to keep its tools in separate drawers. The joke is in the recursion: every “when I’m not” simply folds back into the same three obsessions, as if leisure were just another loop in an elegant program. It’s wry, but not cynical. The rhythm mimics the habits it describes: toggling, iterating, circling back to refine.

On the surface, she’s listing hobbies. Underneath, she’s staking a claim about craft. Writing, “tweaking my computer,” and embroidery all hinge on the same satisfactions: patience, precision, pattern-recognition, the quiet thrill of making something cohere stitch by stitch or line by line. Even “plunging into the past” reads less like escapism than like research-as-immersion, the novelist’s method for building believable worlds. History provides narrative architecture; computers provide systems thinking and control over the tools; embroidery supplies tactile discipline and an eye for detail.

Context matters: Abbey comes out of the generation of genre writers who straddled pre- and post-digital life, when “tweaking” your machine wasn’t a metaphor but a practical reality. Pairing code-adjacent tinkering with domestic needlework also nudges at cultural stereotypes, collapsing the false divide between “technical” and “craft,” between the masculine-coded hardware bench and the feminine-coded hoop. The subtext is a quiet refusal to rank forms of making. Everything is making, and everything feeds everything else.