My flash fiction story “Roomba Requires Your Attention” was published in Kaleidotrope in October 2022. It’s very short, so if you haven’t read it, go check it out here, then come back to find out more about what inspired this story.
In the spring of my second year of law school, I went through the worst period of writer’s block I have ever experienced. Basically, I’d set out to write an entire novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) the previous November—a ridiculous goal given the three tough classes and the all-consuming clinic I ha on my plate that semester—so of course I didn’t complete the novel. I wrote 30,000 words, which I now see as a tremendous accomplishment given everything going on that semester, but at the time, it felt like a huge failure. I had never not written a complete novel in a month for NaNoWriMo, and the websites term for successful participants, winners, wasn’t helping. If I hadn’t won NaNoWriMo, I must have lost NaNoWriMo. For that matter, I had never set out to meet a writing goal and then failed to meet it. So my inability to finish a novel in a month in the middle of law school was a huge blow to my self-confidence as a writer.
In retrospect, this was utterly ridiculous of me, but at the time, it was devastating. I was a failure. I’d never be a real writer. Real writers could get books done no matter what else was going on in their lives. And so I just stopped writing. For months. And because I’m the sort of person who needs to write to be happy, I was miserable about it.
It wasn’t like I consciously said, “I’m bad at this so I’m not going to do it anymore.” Oh no. I wanted to write. I was thinking about my stories. But whenever I found a free moment, I just couldn’t make myself put my butt in my chair and type out some words.
There were other factors at play here, of course. Law school is incredibly difficult and stressful, of course, and I wasn’t having the greatest time socially, and I later figured out that I was on medication that was messing with my mood, but at the time all I knew was that I wanted to write, and I couldn’t, and so I was just failing even more. It turned into a viscious cycle of struggling to write, feeling like a failure, and struggling even more.
This is a lot of doom and gloom for what is actually a very funny story, so let’s skip ahead to the good stuff.
During my spring semester of that year, I took a class called The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence. It was a joint class with half Harvard Law students and half MIT engineering students, where we learned how AI works on a technical level (don’t ask me to repeat that knowledge now, almost five years later), along with the ethical and legal implications of this technology. We actually watched the debate between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk that I reference in the first line of this story.
At some point in this class, someone brought up the fact that the point of AI is to be helpful, and I had the first seed of an idea for this story: what if, instead of AI going rogue and trying to take over the world for the usual reasons, the AI apocalypse came about because technology became too helpful.
And then there was my Roomba. Maybe I never figured out how to work it, or maybe it was just buggy, but it never really seemed to get the gist of vacuuming my apartment. One day, when it was cleaning and I told it to stop and go to its home base, it went in the wrong direction and went right on vacuuming. My roommate and I joked that it had developed consciousness and this was how the robot uprising would begin, with the Roomba insisting on continuing to clean. And the pieces clicked into place.
That night, I sat down and wrote the first draft of this story. I finished it in one sitting. The fact that I sat down and started a story and then finished a story was the key I’d needed to break out of my writer’s block and restore my self-confidence.
I took my time rewriting and revising “Roomba Requires Your Attention.” I don’t normally write funny stories, but above all I believed that for this story to work, it needed to be funny, so I worked hard on that. It was a great challenge, though, and made the story all the more meaningful to me because in the end I felt I succeeded.
Once I felt “Roomba” was in the best shape it could be, I started sending it out to magazines. It took a while for it to find its home at Kaleidotrope, but I’m so glad it did. This little story has a very special place in my heart, a funny little bit of fiction that got me out of a tough time in my writing. And getting out of that writer’s block and getting working on my longer projects again is what ultimately got me my agent the next year and led me to get several more short stories published, including this one.
And what ever happened to that novel I started for NaNoWriMo that got me into that whole writer’s block mess in the first place? I finished a first draft the next year, revised it extensively during the pandemic, and then my agent and I sent out to publishers. Keep your fingers crossed for me on that.