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Post date: Feb 8, 2017 6:25:15 PM

It's so easy to get caught up in the faces of things. I "want" to be a professional writer, except maybe I don't. Maybe what I really want is to meaningfully influence the go-to ideas, metaphors, and frameworks of a large group of people. And maybe there are more fun, more rewarding, and more effective ways of doing that than literally putting words on digital page. It's amazing how powerful it feels to be a bookseller. And, granted, that's being a bookseller at a pretty famous bookstore, and having control over my favorite section, but still. People buy the books I tell them to buy, and then (at least sometimes) they read them. I'm so curious about what it would be like to be in publishing. Some parts of it seem nightmarish-- I love the structure and the social contact of service work, and I've hated the office-ness of every office work I've ever done. But it also seems so powerful. Like, you can touch a lot of stories at once, and pull up the impactful parts, and massage out the shitty parts. Like, the parts you only notice days or weeks after you finished and loved the book, and you go, "Oh my God, that book was full of scary space Muslims!" Or, "Oh my god, that book tricked my into sympathizing with someone who murdered her trans girlfriend!"