My first dream was to be a writer. Before I could write for myself, I made up little stories and my parents obligingly wrote them down for me.1 Eventually I learned to write and did it myself, with increasing sophistication. This fell out sometime around college. Since then, every few years I love the shit out of the experience of writing half a story, then put it down and never look at it again. My writing now is non-fiction on this blog, and I considered myself fantastically lucky for getting this close.
Then I released frogandtoad.ai, which explains the Hugging Face swarm in the style of a children’s book. It turns out my inner 5 year old never stopped wanting to publish stories she could read, and achieving that feels astonishingly good, like keeping a promise and having a promise to me kept at the same time.
It got better: strangers spontaneously offered to translate my writing into their own language. Frog and Toad is now available in German (thanks Robert Herr!) and Bengali (thanks Tazik তাজিক!), and someone has offered to do Russian. While I’m thanking people, thanks Jackson de Campos for volunteering to polish up the website. I didn’t know to hope for this but now I know that having my work translated is basically heroin, except that unlike heroin and making Hacker News, the withdrawal is pretty gentle.
My inner 5 year old wants frogandtoad.ai translated into every language; my outer 40 year old has picked 4 to prioritize. Japanese, Korean, and Mexican Spanish because Frog and Toad has been in their school curriculum for decades, and Chinese because, well, China2. If you’re up for helping with this- translating, telling me a pro translator farmed it out to AI, or sharing translated work once it’s done- I would love to hear from you (elizabeth@northseaanalytics.com).
- My mom never read Harry Potter because it was too similar to something I wrote as a 4 year old. She’s confused, by fantasy standards they’re not even that similar, but I remember this every time JK Rowlings implies she’s a genius for coming up with such an original concept as “a school with magic”. ↩︎
- Frog and Toad did make it to China, but not until 2009. ↩︎
