what the characters do for a living...

[Otto]

>From an interview with Neal Stephenson:

Reason: A critic once said of Thomas Pynchon that he was one of the few
modern novelists for whom what the characters do for a living is more
defining than what their emotional relationships are. It seems to me that
you have that same focus. In The Baroque Cycle, the biggest romantic
relationship in Daniel Waterhouse's life occurs mostly offstage, unless you
count his difficult friendship with Isaac Newton.

Stephenson: There's a false dichotomy embedded in that. It's possible to
have an emotional relationship with what you do for a living. And this is
especially true when you work with other people, because naturally you form
emotional relationships with those people, which get all tangled up with
your relationship to the work itself.
http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml