This week we got real nerdy about trade literature. How do systems like Save the Cat! flatten style and novelty? Can fiction escape corporate buzzwords? How does something like a sentence diagram become weirdly emotional? We also talked about how “Buggins’ turn” (the idea that everyone gets a go, deserved or not) shows up in workplace fiction—and life.

Around the 30 minute mark we read first-draft stories for Buggins’ Turn, which featured unlikely promotions, crumbling hierarchies, and some very unfortunate shifts in the break room.

Buggins' turn. The principle of awarding promo- tion by rotation rather than on individual merit. Buggins is a supposedly common surname, but there were only two in the 1980 London tele- phone directory. The name itself is familiar in another context from 'Grandma Buggins', a tiresome old lady played by Mabel Constan- duros in a radio series that ran from 1925 to the late 1940s.

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