Christopher Saint's Humor Column

Today's humor column is entitled:

You May Have Just Won One Million Dollars!

Because we know that you haven't, and we just wanted to rub that in. Actually, today's humor column-- which should have been written a couple of days ago--is about writer's block, because that's what I have. And no, Writer's Block isn't a font, although it could be now that you mention it. It wouldn't have any actual characters in it though, so you'd get into your word processor and switch from Times New Roman to Writer's Block, and then you'd type and you'd get this:


followed by:


and last but not least, a lot of:



You could lose entire documents just by changing fonts. It would be a beautiful thing. Anyway, here is today's humor column:







Ha ha! Got you! Right, really, no kidding now. Here is the column:

As a writer, I feel--for some odd reason--that I should be writing something.

This is a strange and inexplicable feeling that plagues writers everywhere.

The basic reasoning is this: fishermen fish, baseball players play baseball, zamboni drivers drive zambonis, etc. So, writers are supposed to write, aren't they?

Personally, I think that this is a myth propagated by publishing houses who want actual books to publish. The fools. Don't they know that writing is supposed to be a job where you do nothing, get paid, and travel to cool places to sign books and talk to fans?

"You have to write a book to have a book to sign." You might say, but I never said you had to sign YOUR OWN book. I would be perfectly happy getting paid to sign someone else's books and talk with someone else's fans. I'm not choosy.

I could live in the lap of luxury and pretend to be, say, J.K. Rowling. Or Tom Clancy. Or someone like that. Then I could go to Harry Potter book signings and talk about the series, and my ambitions for the series, what I plan to write about in the next books, and why I hate movie producers for fowling up my stories.

Admittedly, I'd have to fudge in a few areas; some of the more annoying fans would probably ask, "Why don't you look anything like J.K. Rowling?" To which I would reply, "What are you? Sherlock Holmes? Are you calling me a liar? Don't answer that, just take this autographed book and get out of here kid. NEXT!"

Or, being a writer, I could make something up. Hey, it's what I do: "Well, my child. One day when I was signing books in a small Russian town called Chernobyl, a nuclear meltdown happened, and I was deformed hideously. So I had to have plastic surgery, but unfortunately the surgeons got the wrong blueprints, and this is how I turned out. I'm learning to live with it actually, though it is difficult."

Yes indeed, this sounds like quite a promising career.

Maybe I should make it into some kind of business, Look-A-Likes R Us. I would hire people who look exactly like famous writers, then train them to talk and act and write signatures like the famous writers, then hire them out to the famous writers as doubles. That way, when, say, Stephen King is hard at work on a new novel and doesn't want to be bothered with a stupid book signing, or a silly promotional thing, he could hire a Look-A-Like for only 10 dollars per hour, then send them to the book signing in his place. It's brilliant.

Anyway, the point of all this is that as a writer I feel that I should be writing something. And, I'm infinitely annoyed when I can't think of anything to write. This not-thinking-of-anything-to-write is called writer's block. There are whole books you can read about how to conquer writer's block, and entire other books about how to find "inspiration".

Inspiration is like Cocaine for writers. If you can get some Inspiration, then you fly really high on it for a little while, but then the Inspiration wears off, and you come crashing down into the dark abyss of writer's block. You wander for days, stumbling about, smacking into walls, tripping and bruising your head, calling out for help but finding none.

But then, just when you think things are hopeless, and you might have to get a day job (actually, for those of us who aren't professionals, we already have day jobs...sigh, it's a cruel world that makes one work for one's money, at least those of us who are too stuck-up to beg and too snooty to starve), you find a tiny bit of inspiration, like a quarter on the sidewalk.

You have a tiny idea of what to write next, but, you don't really know how to use that idea. So the quarter, it turns out, is stuck to the sidewalk with three-week-old chewing gum. Blast! You struggle with the quarter for a while, but then you give up, and go sit on the grass. There you stay, watching the quarter listlessly, wishing you could have it, and use it. But now you are in a state of Procrastination, which is when you know what you should do, but don't, because you are a lazy son of a gun who wants to not have to work for money.

So you sit there, staring longingly at the quarter, hoping that maybe, if you stare hard enough, you will soften the gum.

Anyway, that is a state that I find myself in far too often. I haven't really figured out what to do about it, except that usually if I just sit down and start writing something random, things come to me. Like this article/column/thing. I said to a friend of mine: "I have writer's block, curse my stupid brain." And she said, "Why don't you write about your writer's block?" And I said, "Wow. Why didn't I think of that." And that is how the last several hundred words came into being.

So, there you have it. I'm not sure what you have, but you have it, that's for sure. I'm considering selling It on e-bay to see if I can get any money for It, but I'm not sure. Because most people just seem to have It, which would mean that selling It would be pretty useless. Besides, how do you pitch something like this?

"Get yourself some It! It's great!"

Right. Y'all have a good week now, ya hear?