I always felt so bad for my husband at my family events. My family is very traditional and conservative, so every event is de facto segregated by gender. The women are all in the kitchen, and the men are all in the living room or on the front porch (depending on the weather).

Acceptable topics of conversation among the men: livestock, farm equipment, and neighbors whose land is adjacent to my grandfather’s farm. My husband is a suburban guy who had been on a horse before he met me.

We were both glad when my cousins’ kids got old enough that he could play games with them. (And video games when they hit their teens.) He got bonus points with my mom and aunts for “taking care of the kids” even though he was just trying to escape the boredom of talking to the adults.

This is exactly why I stopped eating lunch in the staff lunch room. Those people are boring AF and can’t find much to talk about other than work or the gym. I’d rather eat at my desk and read a book.

It turns out that operating industrial production equipment while distracted is a huge safety liability.

That sounds more like the job of an editor than the job of a writer.

When I was an editor, my job was to assign stories to writers and then to work with the editorial team to revise and refine their output into an end product that the publication could stand behind.

Your process sounds a lot like that.

My husband was recently trying to find an exact quote from Richard Pryor’s character in Lost Highway, so he Googled it.

Google’s AI overview said that Richard Pryor was not in Lost Highway and instead gave some suggestions for other films we might be thinking of.

The quote he was trying to remember was, “There’s nine people down here, and you can ask seven of them. If you can get that price from one of them, I’ll let you ask the other two.”