April 14th, 2025 - From, To

Dear TNY,

I’m late again (too old to be pregnant, so don’t fret), which seems to be a theme these days, but I just completed “From, To”.

I’ve said it too many times to count now, but a story containing “culture” does not make it literature.  This story is fucking boring. And if the story isn’t engaging and/or doesn’t contain life, it isn’t worth reading, so no one will fucking care what it’s about, which seems to be the goal of publishing this story, that being that what it’s about is currently “topical”, not that it possesses literary merit of note or quantity, which, to reiterate, is ZERO FUCKING MERIT. And it’s boring in so many ways.  Take, for instance, that there’s a death, a protest, a war (including genocide!), and familial relations.  There’s so much room for conflict! So it takes a deft hand to make boredom out of that.  But you’ve done it!  Congrats!

I’ve been thinking about imposter syndrome lately.  Like, that I have no skills.  Writing, parenting, building, socially, mechanically, culinarily, sexually, nothing really.  That people are kind to me because they feel bad for me.  Even my children. 

I was thinking about that the whole time I read this story.  That you, Debby T, must also feel this way.  That week after week you turn out absolutely mangled cockmeat literature and you know it’s shit but you’re waiting to be called out, but you see that everyone in your life feels sorry for you, for reasons I cannot perceive at this distance, so they don’t call you out.

But then I lit onto this theory just this afternoon!  That you, in fact, have the opposite problem:  Dunning-Kruger.  Here’s Wikipedia’s take on a short definition:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.  This is often seen as a cognitive bias, i.e. as a systematic tendency to engage in erroneous forms of thinking and judging.  In the case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, this applies mainly to people with low skill in a specific area trying to evaluate their competence within this area. The systematic error concerns their tendency to greatly overestimate their competence, i.e. to see themselves as more skilled than they are.

Bud, I think you were surrounded by a bunch of “notable” people in your young life that told you that you were smart, good at literature, and fit for this job.  But the truth is you’re shit at it.  That doesn’t make you a bad or a worthless person.  Just someone who shouldn’t be responsible for cherry-picking literature for humanity in one of the best magazines for it.  Instead, you should be able to look at your tenure at the magazine, in the very least, as over.  Because literature is for us, all of humanity.  You cannot, over the span of a career, represent us.  Get another fucking voice in the goddamn conversation before you kill the artform.  I mean, who gives two fucks about this fucking waste of a story?  I don’t know anyone who likes most of the shit you pick.  Most people I know don’t even finish it.  You just don’t connect.  It’s time to move on.  Smooches and hugs and all that, but fucking learn to let go.

Oh, and since you seemed to miss it every time you read this story, here it is, direct from the fucking story that you just published: 

Lily climbs into his bed, as she sometimes does for a treat, but this is not that.

In case you don’t remember, that’s the MC’s ten-year-old daughter climbing into bed with him, which seemingly sometimes results in a “treat”.  This goes unexplained.  Just hangs there, with a big ol’ “WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK” on it.  Cool, creepers.  Keep it to your fucking selves.

Nick