Imagining Franz Kafka as my personal authorial adversary is a weird combination of self-effacement and self-aggrandizement. It’s not that I think he’d have anything against me personally, especially if that one biographer was right and he was into fat chicks. It’s that he represents everything that as a child I imagined a writer should be (skinny, anxious, male) and that I can’t be (except anxious, I’ve got that down). So he’s an embodiment of my fear that I can’t be a good writer. He seems to have been a nice guy and I don’t think he’d want to embody that fear, but it’s OK, I know it’s really my brain making things difficult for me (LIKE ALWAYS).