"Behind the Scenes": summer check-in with SSL authors

After taking the last couple of weeks off for a bit of summer vacation, we’re back! Feeling rested and rejuvenated, ready to get back to our regularly scheduled programming. But first: one last piece of bonus material.

A couple of months ago, I thought one fun idea might be a semi (at-best) organized roundtable discussion with the authors we’ve published since our last summer break. And said roundtable might be a fun way to get the SSL submission readers a little more involved. Questions were gathered, ranging from more specifically engaging with the authors’ stories published here on SSL to more broad and general takes on writing and reading and life in general. I think it turned into a really fun updated and read! I hope you all enjoy as well.

Next week we’ll be back to new, previously unpublished short stories, published every other Tuesday!

—Aaron Burch
Editor, Short Story, Long

Jim Cuene (SSL Reader): I’d love to hear what you’re doing to rejuvenate or stay fresh creatively over the summer. (this is me asking for a “friend”)

Thomas Mixon (“National Dish,” July ’25): I don’t know what, if anything, it will do for my writing, but I’ve been on Duolingo a lot with my oldest child. He is fascinated by the amount of XP you can get, how to prolong your triple XP boost, what languages most often have popup lightning rounds, etc. He does very elementary Finnish, at a very high speed, to get first place in the Diamond League. I’m more interested in learning the languages, than the literal bonus points, but it’s a fun thing to do together. He gives me “tips” all the time, letting me know how I can reach 10,000, even though I get “busy.” I love him, and this helps, and I can’t see how that can hurt my writing. And other writers seem in on this too - recently, David Sedaris gave an interview on Fresh Air, detailing his obsession with earning a certain amount of points on Duolingo each week. I found his username, based on the info he gave, as did 500 other folks. There’s no messaging feature, but I followed his account, because it was fascinating to see when he did his lessons, and how much. He’s since made his profile private.Bill Capossere (“The Long Departure,” March ’26): Same thing I’ve been doing every summer for 30+ years — roadtripping out west for several weeks of hiking/camping with the family. This year it’s a New Mexico/Arizona/Colorado trip

Natalie Wolf (“The Writing on the Walls,” October ’25): This wasn’t something that I intended to do, but I was recently looking through an old document where I’d written down ideas and partially finished pieces. Looking at some of those entries recently, I felt like I could see them with a new eye, and I felt motivated to work on them again. I also like doing artwork in other media – collage, drawing, etc. – when I have the time. And of course, the classic reading, watching movies, etc.

Caelyn Cobb (“Time Management,” February ’25): I like to do my writing outside when the weather is getting better. A change of scenery and some direct natural light can do wonders. I used to sit on my apartment building’s front stoop and pick up wi-fi from my living room for my laptop. We’ve moved to a bigger building with no real front stoop, but there is a little courtyard with benches in the back of the complex, so I’m looking forward to posting up out there and getting a little work done.

Andrea Cavedo (“Geminids,” April ’26): I’m currently at a writing residency in Fairhope, Alabama. I’ve only been to this part of the country once before—a trip that inspired some research interests I’ve been meaning to pursue, so I was thrilled to learn about the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts writer in residence program, and summarily shocked when they accepted me. I’m staying in an adorable cottage in a charming town, rent-free…waiting for them to figure out I’m way underqualified for this kind of generous treatment and throw me out on the lawn… But until they do, I’m pretending I’m a single woman with no responsibilities other than to my writing, to an extent that I feel like a different person than I did a week ago. It’s been pouring rain the whole time I’ve been here. It’s perfect.

Michael Pershan (SSL Reader): What are the earliest short stories you remember loving?

Bill: The earliest short story I remember being blown away by was Jack Vance’s “The Last Castle,” which I read when I was 10 or 11 in my father’s Nebula Awards Stories Two. I vividly remember sitting on our couch wholly engrossed and wondering where the hell this story was going to take me next. I read it multiple times that week and kept coming back to it. In terms of an author’s collection, it would have been M is for Melancholy by Ray Bradbury, which led to immediately reading all the collections I could find of his, all of which I’ve continued to reread over the decades.

Natalie: I remember reading “Zoo” by Edward D. Hoch when I was in sixth grade or so, and really enjoying that. In high school, I remember “The Flowers” by Alice Walker really standing out to me. They’re definitely very different stories, but I think that they both have very impactful endings, in their own ways. I won’t say anything else, to avoid spoilers, but I would definitely recommend checking them out, if you haven’t already (they’re both very short flash fiction pieces).

Caelyn: I was very into fairy tales and had a few anthologies of them. I still have the Brothers Grimm one that my grandparents got me, probably unaware of how dark and disturbing their versions of classic stories actually were.

Andrea: I remember reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson when I was in 11th grade. I remember being surprised that it was a book, but not a novel, and yet told a larger story—and that writing a book in that way let you explore all these characters from really different angles without a single narrative voice. I didn’t know that something you could do, until coming across it in a (very well-taught) English class.

Jen Savran Kelly (“The Man Next Door,” July ’25): “The Garden of Forking Paths,” by Jorge Luis Borges. I read it in a college literature course and remember being blown away by it because it does things I’d never seen in a short story. Somehow it reads like a true historical account, a mystery, and a magical tale all in one. Borges has been my favorite writer of short stories since.

Thomas Mixon (SSL Reader): If you were forced to completely change either the beginning or ending of your story, which would you choose, and how would you make it different?

Caelyn: Neither! Hands off my beginnings and endings—those are my favorite parts!

Jen SK: Oh, the end. For some reason, I had such a strong sense of who this character was and what her journey should be, but I’ve never felt satisfied with where it ended up, even after many revisions. At some point, I had to trust my love for the story and call the ending good enough. But I still think about changing it if I ever publish it again.

Andrew Huffman (SSL Reader): What non-writing art has been influential to your writing lately?

Caelyn: Like a lot of writers, I use music to brainstorm and figure out emotional tones. I’ve been kicking around a novel idea for my next writing project, and a couple of songs (“Goodnight” by Florence Road and “The Worst is Done” by Weyes Blood) have been great in helping me visualize the ending emotional beats for the story.

Jen SK: TV and movies. I tend to focus strongly on the internal life of my characters and hold back when it comes to plot, or at least to things happening. Paying attention to how screenwriters use drama and tension or comedy to move a story along has been inspiring.

Michael: Are there any non-fiction books/articles/documentaries that you think of as influences on your SSL story, or on your fiction more generally?

Bill: Less influenced than informed by, as I had started the story before reading it, but in terms of information and context, The Insect Crisis by Oliver Milman. Generally though, I read a lot of popular science books and subscribe to a number of popular science magazines, and that influences a lot of my writing across the board. The mind-numbing litany of extinct/endangered species in those sources over the years was the catalyst for this particularly story.

Caelyn: I watch and read a lot of true crime, and I find that a lot of my fiction ends up having a bit of a true crime structure — an in-media-res action scene where an inciting incident happens, followed by a scene that goes back to the beginning to show the character’s backstory. My SSL story was actually a deliberate attempt to not structure the story this way because I do it so often!

Jen SK: The news!

Jim: I’d be curious to hear what you are going to read this summer. Either, what older or “classic” work you’re going back to, or future books you’re excited about.

Ross McMeekin (“The Ecstasy of Marv,” May ’26): A classic work I want to return to is the novella Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. I haven’t read it for close to a decade. To me, Miss Lonelyhearts lives in that space of being funny and clever but ultimately—sometimes unbearably—heartbreaking. I cried the first time I read it. As I remember it, two forces are pulling on the main character, who is a newspaper reporter that gets assigned to write an advice column. He’s affected by the earnestness of those writing letters for advice—some of them are suffering deeply—but also by the cynicism of his editor, who doesn’t care a bit about the plight of the newspaper’s readers, or really anyone. So. Faced with all the suffering of those writing in for advice, will the reporter become earnest or cynical? He’s capable of both…but where will he land? It affected me because his internal conflict, when I read the book years ago, felt like my own: am I earnest? Am I cynical? If I don’t choose–if I even can’t choose–will the back-and-forth between the worldviews tear me apart? When I read it again, I’ll be curious whether that conflict will still resonate with me, or if not, what will now be in its place. And because the novella really moved me, I’m curious if that somehow caused me to misunderstand it–I’ve had that happen with stories before, where I missed the point because I was caught up in my emotions. But mostly I just want to read it again because it might make me feel deeply and think hard about what it means to be human.Bill: I also review, so a lot of my reading will be those titles. A few I’m particularly looking forward to:

• The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories by Ken Liu

• A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

• Tyrant Lizard Queen by Riley Black

• Everybody’s Perfect by Jo Walton

• The Traveler by Andrea Wulf

• And new books by Maggie O’Farrel, Colson Whitehead, Daniel Mason, and Richard Russo

Caelyn: I’m in the home stretch of an essay collection about growing up in different women-run spaces online, and so I’ll be reading some books for research and inspiration for that: How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex by Samantha Cole for an essay about exploring sexuality through smutty fanfiction; re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own for a piece about finally getting my own domain for my high school blog; and Colette Shade’s Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything. For a break from nonfiction I’ll probably noodle around online litmags and Archive of Our Own. I really miss reading and writing fiction. I recently read The Dream House by Leila Lalami and was like, kicking my feet with excitement over the good prose and storytelling.

Jen SK: I’ve been revisiting Virginia Woolf, and a friend got me reading Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, which is an experimental novel published in the 1960s and one of the longest novels ever written. I also want to read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which I’ve never gotten to.

Tyler: Semi-related…Do you have any under-appreciated favs (stories or collections, especially) you want to shout out?

Joe Baumann (“Vivisection,” April ’26): I would like to shout-out Julia Elliott (not sure to what degree she qualifies) for all of her books, but particularly The Wilds—I read this book about a decade ago, and it remains one of my all-time favorite short story collections and I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered anyone who had read it before I mention it. The title story is one of my favorite short stories I’ve ever read.

Ross: The story collection Town Smokes by Pinckney Benedict doesn’t get talked about, or at least not in the circles I run in. It’s a gritty, beautiful, realist collection from the 80s. Its stories take place in Appalachia, and each one is moving, in particular the opening story, “The Sutton Pie Safe,” which involves a family whose pride and history are being splintered by the need for money, with a young boy caught in the middle. It’s a heartbreaking story that is so humane it hurts to read. I wrote my graduate thesis on his work in part because of it. He hasn’t published a book—or even a story, I think—since 2010, and let’s hope that changes.

Bill: It’s not really underappreciated as it was met with lots of praise when it came out, but it’s been decades and the author sadly passed away relatively young, so I think it’s possibly been flying under the radar for a while: Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan, a southern magical realism narrative via short stories. (And thanks for this question as it led to finding out Kenan had another collection published the year he died, which I was unaware of and have now just ordered)

Natalie: I feel like some of these are probably already pretty well-known/appreciated… but I also think that what’s considered “well-known” can vary a lot from person to person. So I’ll just shout out the following. For collections: Bliss Montage by Ling Ma and Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. And for individual stories: “The Continuity of Parks” by Julio Cortázar, “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” by Jamil Jan Kochai, “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson, and “The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra” by Kenan Orhan.

Caelyn: I loved Ling Ma’s novel Severance–I’ve been meaning to check out Bliss Montage! I am a big fan of Danielle Evans’ Office of Historical Corrections. She does endings so well. The stories conclude at an emotional stopping point but not necessarily a story stopping point, which to me is key to understanding what a short story can do as an art form that others can’t: follow an emotional arc above all else. Another collection I love to recommend is Kelly Robson’s Alias Space. Every story is a completely immersive new world; her range is so impressive and inspiring.

Andrea: I’ve been reading a lot of very short fiction recently and keep finding myself drawn to the same authors: Emily Rinkema, Sarah Chin, Sumitra Singam, David James Poissant. I also feel weird affinity for British writers, like Eley Williams and Tessa Hadley. I think Tyler Gooch and Talia Argondezzi are so funny.

Jen SK: The collection I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle. The stories follow young women in their twenties in varying stages of transition. Some read like a slow burn and others get right in your face. Every single one makes you feel and think, and I loved it so much.

Tyler: Building on that, and something maybe a little more specific… Are there any books/stories that were crucial influences to your SSL story?

Joe: Two particular books come to mind: Emet North’s In Universes and Muriel Leung’s How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster. They’re both super surreal and funky. They’re both novels-in-stories, and my story “Vivisection” is part of a sort-of-novel-in-stories and, I like to think, also pretty funky!

Ross: My SSL story, “The Ecstasy of Marv,” involves a huge, secret cavern filled with wine discovered beneath a house, with a skeleton inside. When I showed it to my Dad, the first thing he said to me is, “It’s kind of like “The Cask of Amontillado””—the classic Poe story—which I haven’t read since probably high school. The similarities between the stories had never occurred to me, but I wonder if maybe that influence crept up from my subconscious and inspired parts of the story.

Natalie: My story, “The Writing on the Walls,” is about a couple who move into a house with some mysterious writing on the walls (and then things get spookier). Although I wasn’t thinking of them when I first had the idea for this story, I was probably influenced, at least on a subconscious level, by “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar.

Caelyn: My story, “Time Management,” is about young women workers who use a time travel device to get ahead in the workplace, but then realize that it gives them a power as workers that their bosses can’t touch or understand. I had just read Temporary by Hilary Leichter, which is a fabulist novella following a woman’s journey through the oddities and instabilities of work, and definitely the surreality of it inspired my fairy-tale-ish take in this story. Of course, looking back at the full draft, I remember thinking, is this like a subconscious fucking Harry Potter time turner reference? I inserted a joke about it into one draft, that the bell they use reminded the narrator of an author she loved as a child who got radicalized on the internet and went off the deep end, but in the end I decided to just get rid of it because she’s the worst and annoys me.

Tyler: A third version of the same sort of question: what other writers do you see yourself as being in lineage with?

Bill: I’ve been working on a cycle of stories, each set in a fantastical museum (Museum of Obsolete Colors, Museum of Grace, etc.), and those are certainly in kinship with Italo Calvino’s work, particularly Invisible Cities.

Caelyn: Definitely George Saunders and Karen Russell, who do a great job balancing humor, whimsy, and commentary on the dark parts of our psyches so well. Some others: the aforementioned Hilary Leichter, Gwen Kirby, Aimee Bender, and our own Amber Sparks.

Jen SK: Some contemporary writers that inspire me are Lorrie Moore, Miriam Toews, Marilynne Robinson, Bryan Washington, Carmen Maria Machado.

Jim: What are you going to be listening to this summer when you’re not writing?

Natalie: The new Olivia Rodrigo album. Probably for one-two weeks nonstop when it comes out.

Caelyn: Also probably the new Olivia Rodrigo album.

Andrea: I feel like I’ve said this before in comments on other SSL posts, but the New Yorker Fiction Podcast is one of my favorite things to listen to. The first half of the show is an author reading someone else’s story from the New Yorker archives, and then they discuss it for the other half of the show—for me, coming from almost no academic training in writing, it’s been so illuminating to listen in on why something works (or doesn’t). I feel like I’m lurking in the back row of an MFA class while I’m cooking dinner or folding laundry. So…that, and the new Olivia Rodrigo album.

Jen SK: I also love the New Yorker Fiction Podcast—as well as Good Hang with Amy Poehler and Selected Shorts. I haven’t been listening to much music lately, but it seems like I have to get familiar with Olivia Rodrigo!

Thomas: How many times a year, if any, do you think of, or actually follow through with, stopping writing?Bill: The first creative writing I can remember is my contribution to George: Man From the Dead, a chapter book my third-grade class wrote and printed. (My writer friend from that class remains bitter that I was the only to write two chapters, especially as one was the concluding one. I remain annoyingly proud.) I’m pretty sure I never stopped after that and honestly cannot even imagine what not writing would look or feel like.

Caelyn: My entire writing life has been littered with half-finished stories and neglected outlines. I am constantly getting bored, I think. This is probably why I always come back to short stories. Of late I’m reminding myself that if I don’t finish what I’m working on now, how do I know I’ll be able to finish the next thing? And further, I can’t work on the next thing until my current project is done. It’s mostly working.

Jen SK: For the first time, I’ve been struggling to write—for almost a year. The reason why is a whole essay I’m working on now. I’ve been writing that and other things here and there, but I’ve given myself a lot of time off, which has been both amazing and deeply uncomfortable/depressing. I’m starting to get back to a more regular practice, which feels like a relief, though I know I’ve needed that time off.

Thomas: I’m curious in what ways you’re looking to experiment with your own work, moving forward — is there something structurally that you’ve been thinking of? Or with syntax? Are there current events you’d like to incorporate into or build your work from — if so, how do you move past reportage, or from preaching to the choir…is there an identifiable choir you have in your head, when you write?

Joe: I’ve recently become enamored with the linked story collection and novel-in-stories (what makes something one versus the other, you might ask? Please don’t ask. I don’t know.). And I’m really interested in the sort of “multiversal” version of these—where characters recur, in different circumstances, as different ‘versions’ of themselves in different stories. That goes a bit beyond syntax and structure (at least for an individual story), but it’s definitely something I’ve been playing with in my current project.

Bill: I play a lot with structure in my essays, and I really like hermit crab essays, which take the form of another kind of writing. For instance, my most recent one was based on the “Please Update Your Security Questions” process I’ve had to periodically go through. One of my WIPs now is an alphabetical list of what I’ve lost and found over the years, both tangible and intangible.

Caelyn: I like trying out new genres. I am in the process of publishing a collection of short stories, and writing an essay collection/researched memoir right now. Next up, I want to try a novel and then a linked story collection. That’ll keep my ADHD ass busy at least through 2040, I think.

Jen SK: I’m deeply interested in people. I find that when I focus on character and story, I avoid reportage or preaching. Lately, I’ve been getting even more laser focused on character studies in my fiction.

Harrison (SSL Reader): What is your writing process like? For example, do you like to outline? Do you draft and redraft, or do you put it together carefully as can be the first time around?

Ross: I always move chronologically through stories, even in my revisions. I start and go to the end, then start again and go to the end, over and over. I’m envious of writers who can jump around, and those that outline their work, because I think it’d save time and effort. But it’s difficult for me to think creatively without being in the natural flow of the story.

Thomas: Ross, I also go chronologically. I get too in my own head, if I try to jump around. Back in college, I tried to stage Angels in America completely in reverse. I believe the only justification I had for this was that it seemed different. Of course, it was different, but probably not good. I also tend to want to hold onto parts of a story past the point they should be let go, both in writing and reading. My favorite book for the longest time was Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, because I was so taken with the first third of it. I thought the first third was perfect. I love the idea of trying to write out of sequence, but would need to trick myself into thinking I was writing it in order.

Bill: I only outline my plays, using the Beat Board in Final Draft which is more visual: I can create boxes to fill with text for scenes or parts of scenes and color-code them based on characters or themes. I’ll use the boxes to do a rough early brainstorm of scenes, sometimes with an ending in mind, sometimes not. Then I keep adding/modifying that outline as I work through the play drafts, moving scenes around in time, dumping scenes I’ve decided against in one corner, adding new scenes I realize I need in another. For essays and stories I write from beginning and eventually to the end (sometimes already known, sometimes discovered on the way), though I edit and backtrack as I go. I call it the “leave no bad sentence behind” method, and it’s not one I recommend. Even in the essays that are braided or the stories that are non-linear, I don’t write out of order, though I will do that with play scenes (mostly avoiding tackling a scene I know will be tough).

Natalie: I feel like my writing process varies based on the piece… for the most part, I’m someone who tries to do some brainstorming as/before I’m writing, and get an idea of where I’m going with a piece before getting too far into it. I like to scrawl out a bunch of ideas on notebook paper; I often feel like I can’t fully think things through without writing them down, ideally on paper. I probably lean more towards trying to put things together more carefully the first time around, but I definitely go back and revise fairly frequently. And I’ll go back and add in elements that I thought of later on in a story to earlier portions of it, for consistency. However, while my usual process involves more planning, I will say that I occasionally write flash fiction pieces quite quickly, without much planning.

Caelyn: I have to have the beginning and ending of any story or book or essay worked out in my mind before I can pull the trigger on writing it. Then I will go and create a loose outline of the various scenes I envision, though they sometimes shift around as I flesh them out. The outlining process is my favorite part of writing so I basically am drafting in an outline up until almost the very end, kind of tricking myself into not realizing that I’m actually doing the writing now. Usually I am going through chronologically, but I jump around too if I’m getting stuck. I then do a final read through for prose, let the story rest a bit, then repeat until I feel good about it for submission or sharing with others. I’m a very slow writer and so by the time I get to the end I’m loath to do any major changes. I’d rather be onto the next thing.

Andrea: I like to think of my writing process as impressionistic, though that’s really not the right descriptor. I typically bounce around from scene to scene as I get bored and/or inspired. Big chunks of my first drafts are just lists of questions, or snippets of unattributed dialogue, or random images. Sometimes this makes revision really hard (how is that piece supposed to fit with this thing over here, hmmm) but weirdly I tend to finish projects faster this way than if I start at the beginning and work my way methodically to the end. For short stories, I typically don’t start writing until I know the beginning and ending. For longer things, I usually don’t know the ending until deep into the writing. I also prefer typing, I think because it lets me more easily tinker on the line level, but I’ve found that I must have a longhand notebook for figuring out things like chronology, or sequences of cause and effect. It’s like writing by hand gives me a wider scope, while typing zooms me into the details.

Harrison: What is your favorite story idea you’ve had in the past that you’ve yet to write, or a story that you wrote long ago that you feel is maybe due for a rewrite soon?

Bill: I’ve a semi-satirical play about school shooting that’s been lingering for a long time at the end of ACT I, and while I know the ending scene, I’ve been having a hard time bridging to that point. It doesn’t help that our world keeps making satire more and more superfluous (witness recent news that schools are employing armed drones to take out possible shooters)

Thomas: I often think about going back, maybe four years or so in my files, and rewriting every story I tried to submit that never found a home. I wonder if reading them first would help, or hinder the process. Or maybe keeping the titles but writing entirely new narratives? I love the idea of titles as prompts…would somebody write me a table of contents with like maybe 12 titles, and then I’ll write a story for each? I will reciprocate! Related to this, when I let a title sit in my brain for a while, any plot ideas go out the window, during the writing. For years I had the title “Until the Angels Burn” in my head, and vaguely thought it would involve a church, maybe a piano or organ, miniature angel statuettes, etc. When I finally wrote it, it was set mostly on a mini-golf course, and involved a long letter from a mother defending the artist whose exhibit accidentally cut off her hand.

Caelyn: I wrote a story a few years ago that didn’t make the cut for my collection, about a recent history PhD grad who starts a necromancy business using some archival sources from his thesis, and brings his PhD advisor back to life to show her. There are a few things that need reworking and I figured if the story still spoke to me later on I’d revisit it. I think that point is coming up, maybe once I finish this essay collection and need to stretch my fiction muscles again.

Andrea: I have something in my Notes app that just says “apprentices on the great stalactite organ.” That sounds like something, right?

Jen SK: I wrote a story many years ago titled “The Garden of Untold Stories.” I loved the idea, but it never found its groove, because no matter how many times I revised it, the idea/structure always upstaged the story itself. I still think about it though and would love to come up with another version of that.

Harrison: Who are your go-to beta readers? Are they close friends and families? Do you have a writing group? What do you like about the critiques they provide?

Bill: My wife hears a lot of what I write in its rawest form. Right now, for instance, she hears each new scene of the play the morning after I finished it. I’m also in two writing groups that meet every 4-5 weeks. One began as purely a playwriting group, but we’ve broadened over the past 2-3 years to include our other writing. And the other one reads/writes everything. There is nothing more valuable than people who will be honest and detailed in their responses to your writing and who will call you out on your writerly tics or those favorite lines you really know deep down should go but you just can’t do it until they give you the push.

Caelyn: I have a writing group discord with some other fiction writers I met online during the pandemic lockdown, and sometimes I solicit them to beta read pieces for me. I’ve also had a friend who is a prolific bookstagrammer with similar tastes to mine look at things too. I really don’t use beta readers often enough, honestly. It’s hard to find the time to return the favor! I actually never ask my spouse for his thoughts on my writing. He has very different literary tastes than I do, and I always think of Margaret Atwood’s warning that your beta reader “should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.” Smart lady.