The Husband Generator / 2024

While I was working on The Husbands, I created a little “husband generator” in Tracery, Kate Compton’s wonderful tool for making little generative texts. It was just for me to mess around with, a tool to help prompt ideas; it combined thousands of different personality traits and habits and hobbies and sentences and lists of words to generate suggestions for men who might conceivably exist. (It doesn’t use AI — it’s basically a complicated version of those flip-books for kids where you mix-and-match different hats, heads, torsos and legs!)

When the book came out, I worked with Rich Holman to create an online version of the generator. Try it out here!

There’s also a simpler card game version that I take around to events. Everyone gets five cards and can trade with other players to try to make the best or the worst husband. It’s a lot of fun!