I fed the opening of Pride and Prejudice to fourteen AI content generators. Here’s what happened.

So there I was, scrolling through social media, when an ad popped up on my feed.

“Write blog posts 10X faster with robots!” it said.

O-kay, I thought. Sure. What could possibly go wrong?

A bit of googling later, I’d fallen down the rabbit hole of AI content generation—sites that promise to take the pesky work of, well, coming up with words out of writing. In exchange for a prompt (and in some cases a subscription fee), these sites will autogenerate text—or rather, content—freeing writers up to do whatever writing is about for them besides stringing words together in meaningful ways.

Some AI sites helpfully offer suggested topics, such as fashion, or banking, or cryptocurrency, or everyone’s deepest passion, search engine optimization. 

But they also all let you enter text of your own. So, I entered this:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Then I sat back and let more than a dozen different AI content generators tell me what, exactly, they would do with the opening line of Jane Austen’s most well-known novel.

Not surprisingly, none of them responded by generating a copy of Pride and Prejudice on the spotHere’s what they did instead.

Some AI programs played it straight

Faced with that opening line, this AI started to write a paper on the subject.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. This prevailing wisdom is the impetus for Mrs. Bennet’s obsession with finding husbands for her five daughters. She is convinced that if her girls do not marry well, they will be destitute for the rest of their lives.” –Simplified

More AI programs tried to play it straight, but just lost hold of the narrative along the way

“The novel is about a single man named Mr. Bennet who has five daughters. He is in want of a wife for his daughters and so, he must go to all the trouble of finding them one.”—Rytr

I do appreciate the daughters’ willingness to share.

“It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged, That A Single Man In Possession Of A Good Fortune, Must Be In Want Of A Wife is a novel about Elizabeth Bennet and the five husbands she does not marry.” –Anyword

Five women who marry one wife, one woman who doesn’t marry five husbands. It’s all good.

“Jane Austen is famous for her novels, like Pride and Prejudice, which are full of beautiful language. They are a must read for anyone who has even a vague interest in English literature. #8: Memebox Blogging Challenge Winners Memebox Blogging Challenge. Memebox is a Korean skincare and beauty eCommerce store that curates high.” –Peppertype.ai

English literature, memebox blogging, skincare. It’s all good.

One AI decided to throw shade on Miss Austen herself

“Contrary to popular belief, love can be found in the most unlikely places. And very often, those places are not to be found in a romantic novel like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.” –Copymatic

You tell them, Copymatic.

Many AIs just wanted to help those fortune-possessing single men out

“The search for a wife can be a daunting task. There are many factors to consider, from finding someone who is compatible with you on a personal level to making sure that she meets your family’s approval. If you’re starting to feel the pressure to find a wife, don’t despair. With a little bit of effort, you’re sure to find the woman of your dreams.” –Jasper

“A wife can help manage your money and provide financial stability for your family. She can also help take care of the home and children while you’re away on business or vacations. Plus, she can add some much-needed spice to your life! –Scalenut

“Single men have a bad rap. We’re portrayed as sad, lonely and desperate. But the reality is that being single in your 20s and 30s can be liberating and exciting. This chapter of your life gives you the freedom to pursue the things you really want … without worrying about meeting someone or finding an old lady roommate who will judge you for leaving jam out on the counter.” –Writesonic

“Women are natural managers and caretakers. They make great wives because they are able to understand finances, make good decisions, and are great at taking care of others. They also make good mothers because they can be nurturing and have a deep understanding of human emotions.” –HyperWrite

So many AI-generated reasons a man might want a wife, so few AI-generated reasons a wife might want a man.

One AI gave a shoutout to … no, not to women getting married. To the mothers of women getting married

“It is a truth universally acknowledged by mothers of daughters that weddings are an expensive business. Invitations, flowers, dresses, photographers, catering companies—the list goes on.” –Copysmith

Some AIs had their own agendas to pursue

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. But the subject will become clear if we consider how this very circumstance was taken into consideration by Joseph Smith while he endeavored to persuade his brother Hyrum about marriage.” –Zyro

Sure, sure, that was my first thought too.

We are a community of single men and women who are looking for friendship, dating and more. Join us today and get access to our private forums, where you can post your own profile, send messages and get replies from other members.” –INK

I mean, why are you even on the Internet if you don’t have something to promote?

But a couple AIs actually seemed to get that this was fiction, and they wanted to come out and play

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. But what happens when that man is not so much in possession of a good fortune, as in possession of a bad one? 

“This is the story of [name], who was not quite as rich as he thought he was. He had recently inherited his father’s estate and was now feeling the pressure to find himself a wife before it all ran out. So he went on an adventure with his friend [friend name] to find love, but instead found fame!” –Copy.ai

With a hook like that, who wouldn’t hit refresh for another round?

“This is the story of [name], who wasn’t ashamed to admit that he was a little bit of a gold digger. Though, in this fairy tale there are no evil queens, but instead a group of misfit girls who befriend [name] and help him with his flirting. With the help of his new friends, he finds his prince charming.” –Copy.ai

Even better!

And finally:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

“But what if that single man is too busy being a vampire hunter to think about getting married?

“Enter Jane Austen, who will turn the vampire hunter’s world upside down with her wit, intelligence, and charm.

“Austen is the perfect match for the vampire hunter, and not just because she is a formidable opponent to the undead. Austen is also a woman who knows her own mind, and is unwilling to compromise on what she wants in life.

“The vampire hunter may think he is in control of his destiny, but Austen is about to show him that he is not the only one who can be a hunter.” –Smart Copy

I have no idea where you pulled this from, Smart Copy, but I’m here for it. I’m here for it.

Conclusions?

Read line by line, AI generated prose was more coherent than I expected, except for the places where it wasn’t. The actual content behind all that prose was less coherent, though, except for the places where it made sense after all.

Seeing the male gaze so strongly at work in the world of AI content generation was a bit startling, though it shouldn’t have been. Everything an AI generates ultimately comes from us humans, after all.

There’s probably a lot more AI generated content out there than most of us realize, or more than I realized, anyway. That’s useful knowledge to add to the informed skepticism we need to bring to all the things we find online. 

Finally, if we are going to have robots churning out copy for us, it’s better to credit them and poke fun at them than to quietly cut and paste and claim that copy as our own.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go auto-generate the rest of that vampire story.

Or maybe not

In the end, sadly (happily), AI content generation just couldn’t bring the story of Jane Austen and the vampire hunter home. 

“… The vampire hunter may think he is in control of his destiny, but Austen is about to show him that he is not the only one who can be a hunter. What starts as a battle of wills, quickly turns into something more, as the two realize that they have more in common than they first thought.

“The vampire hunter and Jane Austen may seem like an unlikely pairing, but they just might be the perfect match. What do you think about the vampire hunter and Jane Austen as a couple? Do you think they would be able to overcome their differences, or would they ultimately end up driving each other crazy? Post your thoughts in the comments below!”— Smart Copy

So no, AI content generation isn’t going to replace living breathing writers quite yet.

But if you do have thoughts, feel free to do as the AI says, and share them in the comments below.

Doing the “you” things—honoring our (highly individual) writing processes

I’m a messy writer. I jump in, with little more than a character or an idea, a few sentences or a scrap of voice, and I just start writing.

I don’t know where the story is going. I don’t know where it will end. Or maybe I think I know these things now, but I’ll find out later that I’m wrong. Either way I dive in, doing the story equivalent of throwing word-clay on the wheel and letting that clay splatter all over my hands and clothes, creating a rough draft that will ultimately bear only a ghost of a resemblance to my final one. I keep writing and rewriting over the course of five or more drafts, shaping the story, layering things in.

I love my writing process. There’s energy and joy in it, and in the end, I wind up with stories I’m proud of. If there’s angst along the way, a fear that this time, unlike all the other times, the story won’t happen, well, some part of me knows that’s part of my process, too.

My process.

For some reason we seat-of-the-pants, outline-eschewing writers are an insecure bunch. I hear new — and not-so-new — writers stressing about how they “need” to learn to outline, because not outlining is too slow or too inefficient or too … something.

Meanwhile, the Internet is filled with posts about how to map out our stories ahead of time. In one-on-one conversations with planning writers, I hear things like, “I don’t have the time not to outline” and “It’d be lovely to jump in, but I don’t have that luxury.”

As if it’s a luxury to write in the way that gives you the absolute best story possible.

I’m all for experimenting, for testing new processes, for trying new things. None of us should be hobbled by assuming that the way we do things now is the only way we can do things, ever. But there also comes a point when, no matter what our best process and best writing practices, we really do know what works for us.

When that point comes, I believe in accepting it — not with anxiety or fear, but with joy.

How much word clay you get on your skin and clothes doesn’t matter. Only the story you come away with in the end matters.

As for time, that thing none of us has enough us — well, nothing wastes time like fighting the way your story wants to be written, and along the way, the writing itself is usually much less fun.

Two stories:

One. A writer friend called me one day, wanting to know how I “organized” the work for my research-intensive novel Thief Eyes, because she was working on a research-intensive project of her own. After some hollow laughter at that word, organized, I allowed as how I didn’t write Thief Eyes with an up-front organized plan. Instead, I jumped in, and wrote, and let the story tell me what I needed to know. Only once I had words on the wheel did I begin researching and revising in earnest.

There was a moment’s silence, and then my friend asked, “So what did you do, then? Use notecards?”

Fortunately this was a voice call. When I banged my head against the wall, there was no one there to see.

When I say I don’t plan or outline, I mean I don’t plan or outline, not that I plan and outline differently. I think this process is sometimes alien to those who do follow a more outwardly organized process that they can’t imagine it working at all.

But it does.

Two. A while back, I had a book I wanted to write whose shape was already clear in my head, much more so than most of my books are. I could have honored that gift and made use of it by taking it with me into a messy first draft, but instead I thought, “Oh! Maybe this book is one that I actually can outline. Maybe I can finally speed everything up after all!”

That should have been my warning right there, that voice in my head looking, not for a new technique that would make my story better, but for a shortcut instead.

I now have that book outlined in a file, and no desire to work on it, because the story feels dead to me.

I put all the bright shining first-draft energy of discovery into an outline that in the end was nothing like a first draft for me, and now instead of joyous momentum and something I can revise into a second draft, I have lifeless words on the page.

Fortunately, this was a spec project, so I set my outline aside in the hopes that, with enough time and forgetfulness, that outline will fade from memory and the first draft energy will return. Which is fine, but also pretty much the opposite of saving time.

For another writer it might have been different, which is actually the point. We all have our own glorious processes, messy or otherwise. We need to honor them, not fight them.

Some years ago, writer Leah Bobet was talking about honoring her processes, and also about, just once, trying to fight them for a difficult project. “Everything just worked again when I just did Me Things,” Bobet said.

That strikes me as excellent of summarizing the most important thing I’ve learned in a decades-long career.

Learn your processes, challenge them even, and push yourself as hard as you can to write better. But in the end?

Just do the you things. It’s the best writing advice I know.


A version of this post originally appeared on my blog here, because some things really don’t change. Except that now, of course, I’d have to make sure I didn’t have video turned on when I banged my head against that wall.

Love and Perfection

“We love the things we love for what they are.”

That’s from Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook.”

Variations on the line had been bouncing around in my head for a while before my husband and fellow writer, Larry Hammer, reminded me where it came from.

I’d been thinking about Frost (without knowing it was Frost I was thinking about) because I’d been thinking about how once we reach a certain basic level of craft, writing is no longer about avoiding mistakes or carefully not doing anything wrong.

It’s about the things we do right.

No one ever loved a book, after all, simply for not making any mistakes, for all that there are (varied, individual) things that can throw each of us out of a story. But we don’t love a story just because we aren’t thrown out of it, either.

We love books for what they do, not for what they manage not to do. We love them for the thing or things that hit each of our particular story buttons, that reach out to bridge the gap between story and reader, that pull on us and make us want to or need to read on. A flawed book that does the things it does very right is far more powerful than an unflawed book that doesn’t.

None of my favorite books—the books I imprinted on as a child and teen, the books that have remained touchstones for me throughout my life—is perfect. I can see that clearly enough when I look at those books as a writer focused on craft—and that has never once stopped me from returning to those books, from treasuring them. 

We don’t love books for the things they aren’t, but for the things they are.

My bookshelves—filled with imperfect books that I adore.

But there’s more to it than that. A while back, in a stray moment when I thought I was thinking about a manuscript-in-progress, I found myself thinking instead: And the same thing is true for people.

On one level, I’d always known this. On another I hadn’t, or had forgotten, or needed to relearn it on that particular day in that particular way. People no more need to be perfect than stories do.

As writers who spend much of our time looking inward that we can become as critical of ourselves as of our stories, this is worth remembering, too. I doubt many people hold their friends and loved ones dear simply because they never make mistakes. Lack of mistakes is not the place love comes from.

We love one another for the same reason we love stories: not for what we aren’t, but for what we are.

As I dig deep to put words on the page, I find that a comforting thought.


Love and Perfection first appeared as a guest post on Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Cynsations. I find I return to it every year or two as a reminder to myself.

“Do you believe that spring will come?”

Bones of Faerie, the first book of my Bones of Faerie trilogy, is about uncontrolled growth: plants that bloom in every season, crops that fight their harvesters, trees that seek human blood and bone to root in.

[Faerie Winter Cover]

Faerie Winter, the second book of the trilogy, tells the opposite story. It’s about endless winter, failure to grow, and the fear that spring might never come.

During our current physical and psychological winter, Faerie Winter is the book I’ve been thinking about.

The story’s protagonist, Liza, is surrounded by adults who remember countless other winters, followed by countless other springs. Liza was born after the war between faeries and humans banished winter from her world, though. She’s never known anything but deadly, unbounded growth. When that growth stops at last, Liza’s first thought is about how much safer the forests have become. Later, when she realizes that those forests have also stopped producing the things humans need to survive, she has no mental roadmap for what might happen next.

When Jayce, a member of Liza’s town’s council, talks about preparing for spring planting, Liza wonders at the fact.

If he feared that the spring crops wouldn’t grow, he gave no sign. Adults believed, somewhere deep inside, that spring would come, for all that they were careful of our rations. Some part of them couldn’t imagine that green wouldn’t return to the world, as if green was something we were born to. I did not understand it. Deep inside I felt as if this gray had surely gone on forever and the forests I’d fought all my life had been merely illusions.

Not all the adults in Liza’s world share Jayce’s certainty, though. As the story progresses, Liza flees a danger that comes from beyond the dying forest with Karin, a fey survivor of the War. Karin is a plant mage, keenly aware of the changes winter has brought to the world, and she asks aloud the question that human adults have not.

The grasses sighed wearily and retreated back into the snow. “They’re not dead,” I said. “Not completely, not around you.”

“They are not dead.” Karin sounded as tired as the grasses had. “But they are dying. Tell me, Liza, do you believe that spring will come?”

Why ask me? I was no plant mage. “The adults in my town believe it.” They believed in spite of the gray trees and the gray skies, the failed crops and the too-long winter.

“So it is with the human adults in my town as well.” Karin held a hand out to the falling snow as we walked on. Snowflakes melted against her skin. “Yet I have never heard the trees so quiet. They yearn for darkness, and some have given way to it. Others slip into sleep, accepting that they may never wake. I am told this is the way of your world. It is not the way of mine. I have never known a forest that was not green. What do you believe?”

Do you believe that spring will come? It’s a question I’ve returned to many times since I wrote Faerie Winter. It’s a question I was asking before I wrote that book, too, before fiction led me, as it so often does, to put into words the things I was already saying.

Because Faerie Winter is fantasy, the question of spring’s return is not merely metaphoric. It turns out the danger of endless winter is real, and so Liza’s inner crisis is echoed by the world’s outer one. Fantasy does that, sometimes—lets us transform internal struggles into external realities so that we can face those struggles head on and in a more concrete way than other types of stories allow.

Do you believe that spring will come? Things have changed so much already—in Liza’s world, in our world. There’s no changing them back. Do we believe that forward change will continue instead, leading us on to someplace new, someplace viable, someplace where things can grow once more?

Do you believe that spring will come? There’s a strange comfort simply in putting the question into words.

On one level, I know the answer, always have known it. If I didn’t believe, deep down, that spring—that the future—would come, writing a book where spring was called into question would have been too much to bear.

On another level, I need, just as deeply, to hear the question asked, and I need to travel the hard path toward its answer, again and again, not just in the books that I’ve written but also in the countless books that I’ve read through the years, ever since I knew how to read. Stories were the thing, after all, that got me trough childhood and adolescence and all that came after. Every misunderstood kid who had adventures and saved the world and found their place in that world was, in their way, another needed answer.

An answer, and also a map—the map Liza lacks—for what the journey might look like. Spring comes. Not always easily, not always painlessly, not always as quickly as we want or as we need, but in the end and at the last. Spring comes. Deep down, I know that.

After all, I’ve taken this journey before.

Doing What You Love: Practical inspiration for writers

doingwhatyoulovecover-medium Doing What You Love: Practical Strategies for Living a Creative Life is now out in paperback! This chapbook draws on my quarter-century of writing experience to share insights and inspiration previously only available by attending one of my talks or, more recently, downloading an ebook. It makes a great gift for any writer in your life who could use a bit of a pep talk. (Including you!) ['Taking risks, rather than being an impractical and foolhardy act, might be  one of the most practical and business-savvy things we can do.'] Available wherever books are sold: – Amazon (bundle with the ebook for 99 cents more) – IndieBoundBarnes & Noble Or visit your favorite local bookstore and ask them to order you a copy!

A Creative Conversation about Career Cycles

I had an amazing Creative Conversation with Janet Lee Carey about Career Cycles this week, where we talked about many of the things we often hesitate to discuss as writers:
At some point, it also hit me that there were no guarantees as a writer and that success wasn’t as simple as just being intense enough or doing any other one right thing. Anything I wrote could ultimately sell or not sell, find its audience or not find it. I had less control than I’d thought—and that was oddly freeing. If there were no guarantees anyway, I realized I might as well just write what I loved.
And:
Support, just knowing we’re not alone with the ups and downs, that we’re not the only ones to invent and reinvent ourselves, is huge. We’re so afraid of admitting to struggles, of being seen as less than perfect. Again, it’s like if others detect weakness, they’ll realize we don’t belong, and somehow magically kick us out of this writing world. But no one can make us stop writing, and no one person controls the whole writing-verse anyway. It doesn’t work that way.
There’s a lot more–check out the conversation here! (And, along the way, enter to win a copy of the Bones of Faerie trilogy.)
Want to talk about writing in person? I’ll be at the Pima County Public Library’s Megamania event Saturday, July 9.
Kidlit for Kidlits panel With Aprilynne Pike, Adam Rex, and Janni Lee Simner When: Saturday, July 9, 3:45-4:45 p.m. Where: Pima Community College Downtown Campus, 1255 North Stone Avenue Tucson, Arizona
Megamania is essentially a mini-comicon run by the library. The full event runs from 1-6 p.m. and is completely free

You don’t have to

You don’t have to write fast You don’t have to write slow You don’t have to go in with a plan You don’t have to outline You don’t have to wait      for the story to say where it wants to go You don’t have to write what they tell you to write You don’t have to learn all the rules You don’t have to be commercial You don’t have to be literary You don’t have to get five star reviews You don’t need a platform You don’t need a brand You don’t need a social media presence You don’t need to be silent      or keep your opinions to yourself You don’t have to be like everyone else You don’t have to be like that bestselling, award-winning author you admire You don’t have to write short You don’t have to write long You don’t have to write blog posts      that claim to claim to have all the answers You don’t have to be perfect You don’t have to do all the things You don’t have to do any one thing You just have to tell your stories      your stories      your stories The ones no else can The way no one else can That’s all That’s all That’s all

Intensity, burnout, and regrouping

Jaye Wells and Tiffany Trent both have posts up this week about writers and burnout. (I totally agree with Jaye Wells on the importance of writers having hobbies, once writing ceases to be one. Writing professionally is one of the things that led me to become a serial hobbyist.) This got me to thinking about one of the cycles I’ve noticed in writing careers, one that we don’t talk much about–the cycle of intensity and burnout. I’ve come to believe, watching countless writers go through this–and having gone through it myself–that writers often spend the first three or four years of their careers talking about how important it is to be intense and productive, sharing strategies for getting more done and being more efficient, talking about how a professional writer has no choice but to write two, three, four books a year. Somewhere in the middle of the first decade, though, many writers go quiet–until somewhere around years six to nine writers often admit they’ve been coping with burnout, possibly alongside other career challenges, and they share those struggles. I think it’s hugely useful to do so. It’s all that sharing through the years that’s made me realize how common this is. The first few years of the first decade of a writing career are often about intensity. The last few years of that decade are often about dealing with burnout in various ways. In between, writers often struggle with either despair or denial, as they realize this writing career thing is a less simple (even less simple) than it first seemed. Sometime after the first decade, a sort of settling in and settling down happens. An acceptance of both the ongoing cycles and the shifting ground of a writing career. A developing of personal coping strategies for doing this for the long haul. Well, either that, or the writer stops writing. I don’t mean that lightly–moving on to do something else is a reasonable response to burnout, too. But one way or another, by roughly the end of the first decade, something often has to give, and something often has to change. That early intensity often can’t be maintained forever, not without, at the very least, allowing for downtime, as well as allowing for the unpredictability of a writing career. I’ve used the word often a lot, above. Careers vary so much that none of this is going to be true for everyone. But if this isn’t the only possible cycle for a writing career to follow, it is a common one. And I think that’s worth talking about, so that those who do go through this cycle know they’re not alone with it. Intensity, burnout, regrouping. Sometimes the cycle repeats after that. Sometimes the strategies developed keep it from repeating. That varies too. Intensity, burnout, regrouping. If you’re somewhere in the middle of this cycle, you’re not alone. You’re just navigating a perfectly normal writing career.

Writer’s block: short answers and long ones

“What do you do about writers block?” It’s a question writers get asked often. It’s also a subject on which writers are tempted to go the hard truths route on when they answer. When I was asked this question, I used to say something like, “Well, I don’t really get writer’s block. I just keep writing.” Maybe I’d throw in some helpful words about how it’s okay to write a crappy rough draft, as if all that stood between a–any writer–and writing was the fear of producing some bad words that they’d need to figure out how to revise later. The truth was, in my earliest writing days, I didn’t believe in writers block, and I did believe in simple truths. Writers write, right? As time went on, I began to allow as how I did at least know what burnout was–both as a writer and in other fields–and that maybe that was what writers really meant, when they talked about writers block. I still think I was right that the phrase, “writer’s block,” might be problematic, if only because it carries a lot of almost-mystical weight among writers, and that naming the specific reasons for not writing–of which burnout is only one of many–can sometimes give being stuck a little less power. But beyond that, when asked what I do about writer’s block now, I no longer have a quick, simple answer. There are so many reasons writers stop writing, as many reasons as there are writers. But if asked to break it down, and given the time for a long answer rather than a short one, now I’d say there are three main things I do when I get writer’s block–or whatever we want to call it–things that, like all writing advice, are right for me, but may or may not be right for anyone else. 1) Sometimes I need to push through. Sometimes what feels like writer’s block really is just a case of the I-Don’t-Want-Tos or the I’m-Scared-Tos. And sometimes even something more complicated than a case of the I-Don’t-Want-Tos or I’m-Scared-Tos can be fought and pushed through. Sometimes, the advice my younger self gave still holds, and I just need to keep writing, keep my butt in my chair, and get those words on the page by brute force. 2) Sometimes I need to step back. Sometimes when writing just isn’t happening, something in the story isn’t working, or I need to figure something out before I can move forward. When that’s true, going for a walk, going to a movie, even just taking a shower or grabbing lunch and giving myself some thinking time may be the break I need to figure out what that something is. Once I figure it out, often the words will start flowing again, no brute force required. Sometimes taking a break just re-energizes me, too, even if it doesn’t lead to any profound story realizations, and that can help my words to flow more freely, too. Writers like to talk about how we can’t afford to take breaks, but sometimes, I think we can’t afford not to. 3) Sometimes I need to step away. Sometimes there are real, legitimate stresses, positive and negative, that take away our focus or our writing time or our writing brain and leave us in a place where we can’t push through, for a short time or a long one, and a shower or a walk or all the writing pep talks in the world just aren’t going to change that. That’s when we need to forgive ourselves for not writing for a time, allow ourselves some grace, and stop beating ourselves up and making ourselves feel worse about something that just isn’t going to happen right now. The truth is that I remain, really, really bad at this. And to be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever been wrong to try responses 1 and 2 first–more often than not, they do work. But not always, and that’s okay. Or maybe it’s not okay. It’s terribly hard, actually, especially when one is also trying to make a living, especially when writing is part of one’s identity and one’s way of being and expressing and existing in the world. I don’t have easy answers to what to do about any of that. (Or even, as Terri Windling says, any difficult ones.) But it’s going to happen to many of us, maybe most of us, at one point or another, if we keep at this writing thing long enough. Most of us will also, at one point or another, find our way back, though we may stop believing that and it may take longer than we expect. I now believe that if we can learn to treat ourselves with compassion during these times, rather than with anger and self-hate, if we can find a way to be gentle with ourselves, this can actually help us through and provide comfort–something that’s especially important at times when writing isn’t there to do these things for us.