Happy and/or sad October, depending on your seasonal affective disorder status! This month brings a chill in the air and the launch of Google Analytics 4, which I failed to register for so if everyone could just clap very loudly when they open this, that would great. I've got graph paper and excellent hearing. And you've got recommendations!

What I'm reading

This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub

If I ran a major publishing house, we'd have an entire imprint for time travel romcoms. We'd also have a gilded falconry hall and a tremendous amount of debt, but as for books I'd be buying what This Time Tomorrow is selling. Our main character, Alice, finds herself transported between her 40th and 16th birthdays. This is probably the only perfect conceit for a novel, as it allows 90s nostalgia to flow freely even as Alice ruminates on aging and death. Just like in my diary! The writing is dry and the romance is light, and I think you'd better go ahead and just buy it.

I'll Show Myself Out, Jessi Klein

Not all humorous essay collections are, in fact, humorous. Many are obnoxious and many others are hacky, and because I seem to have read every one of the latter lately, I was ECSTATIC to find I'll Show Myself Out. Jessi Klein is as funny and sharp as her cover blurbs claim (rare, my friends, RARE), but even better, her essays press on the knots in my motherhood muscles in a way you usually have to pay your masseuse extra for. Be prepared to nod vigorously.

What I'm watching

Fleabag, Amazon Prime

How DARE you all let me wait this long to watch Fleabag? What did you think I would do, just go on living without the Hot Priest, without Phoebe's camera-mugging, without VILLAINOUS OLIVIA COLMAN—as if that is a reasonable way for a human person to exist? This might be the best-written show I've ever seen, but of course you already knew that, you stingy magpies. Look, if you give me the rest of whatever I should have watched five years ago—Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Bojack Horseman, whatever—that will be the end of it. But if you continue to keep quality series from me, I will look for them, I will find them, and I WILL KILL THEM.

How's Taken, by the way?

What I'm listening to

Starter Villain, John Scalzi, Audible

Yes, I may have come to Starter Villain, a book about a man who unwittingly inherits his uncle's supervillain empire, for Wil Wheaton's narration; however, I have stayed for the aggrieved pod of unionized security dolphins. And the talking cats. You'll find other features we unironically enjoy in the James Bond franchise, including execution by volcano, execution by Russian blowdart sniper, and execution by failing to listen to the talking cats, served with a light touch and excellent voice work. Listen if you need a palette cleanser.

What I'm thinking about

Like everyone, I'm thinking about artificial intelligence.

My book is about artificial intelligence (but it's also a romantic comedy because NAME A MORE ICONIC DUO), so I've been thinking about its fictional applications for the past year or so. This week, however, I've also been thinking about it taking my job.

After listening to this Armchair Expert with Mustafa Suleyman, I've come to understand that if Chat GPT isn't quite ready to write this newsletter yet, it certainly will be by the time the Eras Tour wraps up.

In fact, after that episode, I'm not entirely convinced AI didn't write this newsletter. Even as I type, I'm plagued by questions: Did I really come up with that sentence? Or was it shunted into my Sim brain to throw us all off the computer-controlled scent? When was the last time I touched a piece of grass? Where did all this blood come from?

Regardless of which one of us is speaking right now, I should say that the Armchair interview is optimistic overall. Suleyman thinks AI can probably get us out of this whole catastrophic climate change jam and ameliorate everything from global poverty to insect-borne disease, provided we program it to do helpful things. Because it's evolving at a rate many hundreds of times faster than the human brain, AI ought to be able to outperform anything we can do with our minds in about a decade.

I believe that includes both low-volume newsletter production and writing unpublished novels.

I'll admit that I panicked about this at first. What will I do? Where will I go? I'll have nothing to offer but my body, which as we learned last month cannot even sit in a velvet-clad office chair without sustaining significant injuries. No one will buy my books because a robot can write pithy inconsequential romcoms for free! No one will need me to teach because robots can print things off Teachers Pay Teachers for free! I'll be broke and homeless and WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE DIE DIE DIE.

But then I remembered something Elizabeth Gilbert said on her Big Magic Podcast, giving advice to some trembling listener querying her first novel. It's advice I think of often.

The worst thing that can happen is you won't get published, and you already know what it feels like to be an unpublished author.

And it's not so bad, is it?

I got through querying my first novel with those words clutched to my heart. I didn't get published, and sure enough, my life went on, unchanged. So, too, I suppose, will that philosophy carry me through our inevitable surrender to the great AI novel farm in the sky.

If it becomes impossible to publish novels in a couple of years, then I already know what my life will be like. It will be like this*. And this isn't so bad, is it?

I don't know. We should probably all take up a skilled trade, just in case. This week, for example, I learned how to adhere white fabric to the covers of books I won't read, turning my performative bookshelf into an attractive transitional-farmhouse focal piece. Seabiscuit looks awfully nice stacked with a couple of John C. Maxwell titles you can no longer see. And if the robots can't incorporate that into their hostile takeover of humanity, hey. That's on them.

*With the exception of my body having been converted into a rechargeable battery for electricity-starved sentient machines. Which might, in fact, be bad.

Writing updates

I had to take a few weeks off both to rest my shoulder, which you may recall I injured during a free solo ascent of El Capitan*, and to drive my children around during their fall break. They didn't actually need to go anywhere; we just circled the county several times. It was scenic, but there were not enough corn dog stands. Two stars.

So now I'm back to editing my AI rom-com novel, and it remains a largely joyous task. I'm about two-thirds of the way through.

In related news, part of my shoulder hiatus included a break from social media, which you might have noticed if my posts weren't generally reabsorbed into the pulsating organs of the Metaverse a few seconds after I make them.

This is because I am bad at working for Instagram. During my hiatus, it also became clear Instagram is bad at working for me. And while I know it will be hard to live without my bi-monthly comments on cereal tie-ins at the TJ Maxx cosmetic counter, I think I'm probably just going to let the thing sit dormant until it's time to start querying again.

Then it will be all Tik Tok dances and trending audio, baby!

*and typing

Relevant blog posts

Nah.

Happy Halloween!

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