Last night on the way home from a two-hour meeting all the way across town, I called my sister in the hopes she would cheer me up. I'd had a really rough day and was feeling really insecure about my writing.

(Editor's Note: This is going to be my memory of the conversation and therefore probably not what she said at all. But isn't that how life goes? And if we didn't go with it a little we'd have zero material, so bear with me. Also, it was really nice of her to cheer me up when I totally called HER and interrupted her evening with my hunger-fueled angst. Thank you, Sister Little.)

She started telling me about this series of books she was reading by Isaac Asimov and how the first couple of books he wrote in this series were almost exactly alike and therefore really boring but how the last one was written twenty years later and it was so amazing it changed her life and she wants to have his cryogenetically preserved babies.

Okay, I made the last part up.

And I was all, "I'm feeling like a suck writer and you tell me how Isaac Asimov is so awesome he changed your whole worldview with one novel?"

And then she was all, "Well, you shouldn't compare yourself to the greats."

(pause for souls to be crushed and angels to fall from heaven)

In the pause, she may have heard my psyche keening for its hold on perspective. 

<insert uncomfortable silence>

And then she said something like, "This is sort of like when you told me about how giving birth completed you right after I broke up with my boyfriend, isn't it?"

And I was all, "YES."

(!!!)

But then she reversed and started distracting me with how eventually -- as Asimov went on to write forty gazillion books -- he decided to bring all his fake worlds in line with the same planets and everything. And so then, there I was -- standing in my kitchen starving to death because it was eight at night and I'd just gotten home from the world's longest meeting and hadn't eaten since noon -- listening to my sister wax on about Asimov's genius and I started thinking about Asimov standing in his kitchen in the eighties and making that newfangled microwave popcorn and stressing the fuck out because OMG THE PLANETS ARE ALL NAMED DIFFERENT THINGS. And maybe even the great Asimov pulled his hair out and drank some extra wine and stressed over HOW THAT THING HE COMPLETELY MADE UP WASN'T QUITE RIGHT.

And every time I'm sure that it doesn't matter a bit whether or not I try to make my completely fake world right, I should remember that Asimov getting his completely fake world right changed my sister's whole life.

And so it's worth a shot.