Casting spells for time travel

let's draw on light bulbs

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Let’s assume for a moment that we’re all witches.¹ We are magical beings who make things. When we write, when we create, we cast spells: spells that imagine a thing into being and that weave our thoughts and feelings into an object, so that others can share our experiences. Which is nothing short of magic. We are powerful.

Part of our magic is our ability to time travel. Those of us who write for children (or who write anything at all) can travel back to chat with our childhood selves, and they can help us write.

When I was a kid, I played a game where I showed Laura Ingalls around the New Jersey town where I lived. That was also a form of time travel.

Many in Gen Z report feeling anemoia, which is nostalgia for a time you didn’t actually live through.² More time travel.

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I have been thinking about what it means to live a life — as a person and a writer — outside of the internet. A few days ago, I spent several hours printing and piecing together sewing pattern PDFs. I felt like maybe I should be writing (or maybe just that I should be on my computer), but the sewing pattern assembly was a task I wanted to get done.

Soon enough it shifted from “task I want to get done” to time traveling. Once, there was a time when sitting on the floor, cutting out paper and sticking it together with tape, was a perfect afternoon. Activities like that are good for my brain.

And they are good for my writing. When I finished, I sat down to write and ended up getting decent writing done. The internet-free crafting time had cleared my head.

How did people write novels before computers? I know how I would have done it: I would have written the first draft longhand, and revised as I typed it up. I’d make changes to the hard copy, retype the whole thing, and read it one more time. Probably fix some small things, but I wouldn’t want to retype it a third time.

Writing (typing, really) has become too easy. (The typing is easy. The writing is still hard.) It’s possible to type up a crappy draft and email it to hundreds of agents and editors (don’t do this!). It’s possible to get AI to write for you. As soon as you do those things (especially as soon as you use AI to write) you’re making it really hard to write good things in the future. You don’t want your brain to know there’s what looks like an easy out. You don’t want to be in the position of convincing yourself that the draft is good, even though what the computer writes is terrible.

I wonder if a writer who time traveled from 1970 would think it’s too easy to type a book into a computer and revise it digitally. Because I can see how the process of hand writing, typing, and not ever going on the internet would lead to focus and inspiration that would allow me to get a book finished in fewer revisions.³

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The other day at the library bookstore, I bought a book from 1976 called How to Do Everything with Markers.

It was still covered in plastic — no one had unwrapped this book in fifty years. It’s a craft book by a woman named Laura Torbet who clearly had an amazing time drawing on everything in her home: chairs, tables, shirts, plant pots, placemats, light bulbs, pillow cases, children.⁴ And then she made a whole book about it! And it was published! One of many similar books she published!

Markered light bulbs

Imagine getting really into something. Playing and having so much fun. And then turning it into a book, without ever worrying about platform or likes or engagement. This woman was drawing on lightbulbs. She was having a great time.

What would it take to live like that in 2026?

This is what it was like to live in 1976. I’m sure someone could argue that most of these things are now contained, efficiently, in our smart phones. But you could also argue that this was a time when you might draw all over your house and make it into a book. I especially like that she has listed “lipstick” twice.

When I time travel back to visit myself as a child and teenager, I imagine they think my computer and smart phone are futuristic and cool. And then I imagine them wondering why I’m still staring at the screens. At a certain point it would seem weird, all that staring.

Don’t you have a book to write, or pants to sew? they ask. You are a grownup who can make cookies whenever you want, and instead you’re staring at that rectangle?

Don’t you have some light bulbs to draw on?

Yes.

Over the weekend I was working on a project and made a big dumb mistake. It was big enough that I had to stop for the day and go for a walk to cool off. I was mad at myself, and grumpy.

I turned a corner and a kid (maybe 9 years old) was riding his bike in loops at the end of a road. He said something but I couldn’t hear him. I was too grumpy to engage. But then I got closer and what he said was:

“I miss the old days.”

I stared.

“The neighborhood!” he said, and biked away.

Dave thinks he must have heard an adult say that, but I think he was a time traveler.⁵

If you miss the old days, you can still get there. You don’t have to live all the time in whatever this Blade Runner Fascism Nightmare is. You can visit other places. Cast the spell by sitting on the floor and taping paper together, or by going for a walk.

Don’t you have some light bulbs to draw on?

Don’t you have a book to write?

“Don’t you have a book to write?”

Thoughts and Links

• Have you listened to my conversation with E. B. Goodale yet? She also has a great interview up at Book Party.

• Carson Ellis had some interesting observations when she lost her phone.

• A difficult but realistic assessment of some of the things that are happening behind the scenes in publishing right now.

• I'm really enjoying Rooster (HBO) so far.

• AI is a text-prediction machine that is good at retrieving information but will never understand what it’s spitting back at us.

• The Norwegian Consumer Council gives us: A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• I was surprisingly riveted by this history of pockets.

• The Future Book is so great!

• I definitely identified with the main character in Judgy Bunny and the Terrible Beach.

• ¡Mistaco! A Tale of Tragedy y Tortillas is for all of us who have made a mistake, and who are also hungry.

• The art in Flowers for Mama made me bring the book to a sunny spot so I could really examine how cool it is.

• The Hole does a beautiful, nuanced, and heartbreaking (and heartmending) job of covering an incredibly important and difficult subject.

• Thanks to Book Party for alerting me to Noemi Vola’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, but I did get two of her older ones, which I liked VERY MUCH: The Unforgettable Party, and The Day Moon and Earth Had an Argument (written by David Duff).

1. obviously

2. I learned this bit about anemoia from a photo essay in the New York Times about how people live with dumb phones, which accompanied an article about people who were giving up smart phones.

3. I am very glad I don’t live in a time where you had your “only copy” of your book, your one printout. That sounds stressful.

4. Yes, children:

I absolutely LOVE that the first entry in the THINGS FOR CHILDREN section is tattoos.

5. “Yes, the simplest explanation is probably the right one!” laughed Dave.