A Wild Run: A Blended Genre Anthology

A BLENDED GENRE ANTHOLOGY. ONE PROMPT, FIFTEEN AUTHORS.

As I read over my work one night, I wondered if I was doing it justice. Perhaps I’m too inexperienced as an author to give these gigantic stories what they need. Maybe, if I just explained them to someone with more talent and poise, they would be able to tell it better. I dove into these unproductive anxieties for months, until I was rendered useless for anything creative. I compared my work. I hated that what I saw in my mind was not what I was communicating on paper. I feared I would never have the pretty prose like those I look up to do.

But the fog cleared—as it so often does.

With the help of some incredibly kind colleagues, I realized seeking perfection in your art and work in general merely means that you care. Feeling inadequate means you want the story to live to its full, creative potential. Here’s the catch, though: no one, and I mean no one can write what is inside you better than you can. Because each experience, choice of diction, punctuation or whatever other individuality that a person carries cannot be replicated by anyone else. Your story won’t be better at someone else’s hand because it was created by you. And there isn’t a single entity, human or machine, that can craft it better than its creator.

Don’t listen to the traitorous voice that says you can’t create. Fight back and remind yourself you own them too.

We put together this anthology to showcase the very real enigma of human creation. In a world increasingly complacent with AI, we wanted to prove a point: You can give the same prompt over and over to a machine and it will spit out the same, if not largely similar output. Give authors the same prompt… and watch what the human mind can do.