Novelist Lydia Millet was interviewed in the November 26th issue of Publishers Weekly on the occasion of the release of her new book, How the Dead Dream.

Here’s how she characterized her time working a staff job in magazine publishing before she chucked it all and devoted herself to her writing—

She did, however, land a copyediting job in Larry Flynt’s magazine empire. “I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.

&#151which makes the life of the science-fiction editor seem so mundane by comparison!