Sample samsa with Naomi Kritzer as we discuss why a friend stepped up to start submitting stories for her, the question she asked Madeleine l'Engle when she was nine, why she spent years not reading reviews (even the good ones), her surprise at the way "Cat Pictures Please" went viral, what it's like when you're on "that" panel at a convention, why she wishes she'd told the early editors to whom she'd submitted how young she was, the many writers time has passed by (and how we hope neither of us will join them), what she was told by her mentor after confessing she wanted to be Ursula K. Le Guin, the story she sold to a market by deliberately writing the sort of story that magazine said it didn't want, the inability of writers to know which of their stories will resonate most with readers, whether the stories she's written in response to prompts might have existed in some other form without those prompts, how our writing has been affected by the times in which we live, and much more.