Tasting Notes with Robin Sloan

I’m sitting on a Zoom with the best-selling fiction writer Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

He opens his notes app, nvALT, and the word “empire” is still loaded into the search box from a previous session.

“I’ve been going back to my notes a lot recently, looking for things related to fantasy stories, and epics,” he explains. He flips to the first note and it’s a novel compressed into 3 vivid sentences:

“A man sitting in a coffee shop all day, running an empire from just his phone. A new one delivered every day by an associate. He is the central node.”

“That’s it,” Robin says. He smacks lips in a half-joking, half-serious way and his eyes twinkle like he’s found real treasure buried under an amusement park pirate ship. “It’s got the taste.”

The taste. Robin’s on the hunt for things that have it—words, phrases, ideas, that have the ineffable thing that makes them good. Some of Robin’s notes are just garbage. But some of them become his building blocks, the atomic units, the bricks that turn into his best-selling novels, his multimedia projects, or the olive grove that he runs with his partner. 

But the interesting thing about Robin is he doesn’t look at these things as bricks exactly. They don’t combine together in predictable, linear ways.

Instead, Robin’s notes are more like ingredients—deep yellow saffron, Ceylon cinnamon, black garlic, and white truffle—bits of the world that he throws together into a pot and covers with a heavy lid. He turns up the heat, he adds salt to taste—until out comes a story.