Catfished by another soft-rumped unripe avocado. Be careful out there people

I remember getting into Veedon Fleece as a teenager and telling my dad who replied "Yeah but he's a cunt"

For each a ruse...

My biggest achievement? Probably being the first of my friends to notice that the verse lyrics to Ian Brown's F.E.A.R. were all expansions of the titular acronym. Can we discuss salary?

Ah fuck, you got me. But that's why you've never not seen a copy in a secondhand book store: no-one's rereading it.

That's been on my list for years. It just jumped a few places

We tend not to praise great books for their humour, as if this is somehow to diminish them, but I have never in my read a great book that isn't funny.

Something the Ben Lerner raves (which I think are earned) confirm for me, a person who already believed it, is that people want their serious books to also be funny.

"cognitive surrender"

If, and it's looking increasingly optimistic, there are historians of this era, they'll be able to chart a straight line back from the president of the US threatening nuclear genocide to people deciding it was too bulky to carry a phone and a music player as two separate devices.

Edging towards the nine-year-old learning to take responsibility. Today he attributed a broken flower pot to human error

I don't feel great about it but if it wasn't for court jesters I don't think the kids would ever eat anything

In our family we have a no court jesters at mealtimes policy but it's almost impossible to enforce

One thing I didn't know until I was a grown-up was that soup shouldn't dome in the middle. I thought you ought to be able to grout a bathroom with it.

The most satisfying way to celebrate the publication of a new novel is going on Goodreads and replying "skill issue" to a two-star review of your previous book.

This was remarkable. Definitely not my last of his. I look forward to pretending this is what people are referring to when they use the phrase "speculative fiction"

Ah I should definitely have known it then! I was born in 1985. Kudos to your wife, that's a great bit

Ha! Well guessing from context (and applying a goodwill benefit) I've decided this is probably very funny

Solidarity

As a parent to an autistic 9-year-old on this, the 109th day of the Easter holidays, I'd like to put on record a full-throated fuck off.

Yep, this is definitely part of it. But I think it's also an intellectual vanity that betrays a vestigial reverence the process (of using a LLM) is based on and totally negates. It's strange: the closest we'll probably ever get to the world acknowledging the value of our work.

It's kind of like if we all suddenly decided we wanted to be gardeners but without ever growing anything. Like if we started filling our window boxes with peppers wrapped in cellophane.

It's very funny how many people seem to want to be writers - a job with next to zero remuneration and vanishingly little social cache whose one sizable compensation is that you get to write stuff - without wanting to write stuff.

Thank you for your application. While we appreciate that if you were awarded the position you would have some previous experience to draw on, due to the high volume of applicants we are no longer considering candidates with fewer than three years of rodeo experience.

Tonally, this one was a lot more appropriate. Choosing to see it as charming precocity

We've had a repeat incident. In Oxfam books

Me: We can only buy one book.
Him: No, you can buy two actually [rolls eyes, under his breath] fucking idiot.

I cannot stress how quickly the threat level is escalating.

If you should ever get the chance, twenty-five years after you first read it, to read A Perfect Day For Bananafish with a class of students, boy, you are in for a treat. Still a perfect, perfect short story.

One must always remember the purpose of advice: dissuading and possibly murdering future competition.

Of course, the difference between professional writers and amateurs is amateurs wait for inspiration while professionals go out into the woods for three months each year and live off mushrooms, never learning to identify them, every morsel of nourishment a deadly roulette.