Zen and the Art of… Disappointment

by Laura Anne Gilman

I often refer to “Zen and the art of writer maintenance,” and I’m only slightly tongue-in-cheek. But achieving even a hint of Zen-inspired serenity is difficult, especially when you have a brain that’s trained to look at a scenario and spin off potential threads. “Shutting down our brains” isn’t something that happens easily, if at all.

One of the many ways we screw ourselves up is that faint thought in our heads that says “when I hit X, everything will work. Everything wil...