Writing is a great profession! All you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your eyes bleed, and write a story — compared to lumberjack, ditch-digger, farmhand, truckdriver, mafia hitman, or any honest labor requiring skill and effort, being a bard is the bomb!

The muse does all the hard parts, and you work for bosses, the readers, who by definition can never be wrong.

How many jobs are there were the worker loves his boss? I love my readers.

They take money that could be used for finer and nobler things, beer or poker, first-person-shooter games or renting DEADPOOL, and give it to you instead.

Wow. What a racket.

All you have to do is play play-pretend like you did when you were a kid.

And think through the implications of both factual and counterfactual science and history and human and alien institutions, laws, customs, habits, psychology, art forms.

And make engaging yet three dimensional characters locked in a heart-wrenching struggle with both personal and public happiness at stake, and tell the same in a well-paced, properly grounded, utterly fantastic, and thoughtfully articulate series of plot events using word that are both clear and poetical, memorable yet unobtrusive.

And then do that all without allowing the reader to perceive the tropes and tricks being played on him to mesmerize his imagination.

And write engaging descriptions of scenery that are not too intrusive (which is harder than it seems).

While added necessary exposition and backstory indirectly and engagingly while seemingly writing about something else happening in the foreground for another reason.

Throw in some action and wise observations about the human condition that only you and a few sages have ever put into words.

Throw in some humor.

And voila! It is as easy as baking a cake.

A cake of gunpowder. With a flamethrower. On a unicycle. On a highwire. With a unicorn. Above a tank full of radioactive sea bass with lasers in their skulls. While solving three Rubik’s cubes. That you are juggling. While on fire. Blindfolded. Before deadline.

Still, it beats honest labor.