If It Looks Like a Writer
By George Everyman

Think for a minute about affairs. They are not all that uncommon these days. The good news is that affairs are becoming equal opportunity employers. Women are catching up to men. If you stop to think about it, you might come to the realization that affairs are like the safety valve on a steam engine. That little device that will be blown to bits when there is a malfunction of the boiler. Better the valve than the boiler.

Anyway, I suspect that not too many people are thinking about steam engines and valves when they find out their spouse or significant other is having sex with another person. Which is kind of unfortunate because instead they start down the path of recriminations and meanness and hatred, and then the lawyers are called in and they get a whole lot of money that could have gone to a whole lot more interesting and fun things.

So, what does all of this have to do with writing? Well, a lot,actually. Let's take a purely hypothetical case. A friend of mine. Let's call him George. That's my name too, by the way. Interestingly, his wife has the same name as my wife. Abby. Pure coincidence. Anyway, Abby likes to ride her bike. She's 48 years old and quite pretty. She has cobbled together a cadre of biking buddies. Men and women. Most of them are younger than she is. Dewayne is about 35, I think. You can guess what is coming. Yep, Abby and Dewayne 'hook up' as they say.

I won't tell you much more here, but if you read the book, you'll find out what happens when George finds out.

But the important point here is that George wants to clarify histhought process and he decides to write about it. The problem is that George has never written anything of significance or length in his life. But George, being a pretty simple and uncomplicated person, just sits down one day at his desk and starts to write. He's not overly concerned with the 'rules'. Rules are for real writers and since he's not a real writer, he pretty much goes down his own path.

When his book is finished, in 37 days, he just kind of sits back and thinks about it for a while. He knows that if he thinks about it too much, it's going to weigh on him. He realizes that he hasn't written the great American novel. Actually, he thinks he has, but he's not going to ever share that thought with any living human being.

So he goes ahead and publishes it because it's free to publish and he wants to experience what it would be like to actually sell a few copies. He does sell a few and he gets some reviews and some are good and some are awful. Some readers rip him to shreds, but he soon realizes that Andy Warhol was right when he said to measure your fame in inches.

George begins to live in a fantasy world, where he starts to believe he is a real writer and he hangs out on writer's forums and responds to people who want to interview 'authors'. Deep down, in the craggy recesses of his mind, he knows that he is a fake. A charlatan. An imposter. But it starts to not matter to him, and then one day he has an epiphany. He comes to the realization that everyone can be a real writer. No matter their level of education, or experience, or anything. He also realizes that there are no rules to writing. He compares writing to the art world and he realizes that even Monet broke the rules.

George has come full circle from never thinking about himself as a writer or an author, to the point where he considers himself one of the best. He realizes that there may be something amiss with this kind of logic and thinking, but he doesn't dwell on that. Instead, he just kind of goes with the flow of things.

So you might want to do George a favor and buy his book and actually read it. You are most likely either going to like George or hate him. He's perfectly ok with that. He doesn't like people who waiver. He just kind of hopes that people will stop and think about some things before they automatically react. Maybe that's why he wrote the book in the first place. But then again, it's hard to know what is real and what is not in George's mind.

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