Tag: blogging

7 Reasons Not To Have A Contact Form On Your Website

Okay, up above these words in the menu bar, there’s a page called Contact Us, and we’re beginning to believe that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. In fact, we’re beginning to think we should get rid of it altogether, and we’re coming round to the view that everyone else should too. Now we’re not self-appointed web experts or internet gurus; we’re humourists. If you have a website yourself, we can only advise you to free yourself from the tyranny of the contact form based on our own experience. And, from our experience of having one of the damned things, here are seven reasons to get rid of it.

1. You’ll Have A More Manageable Penis. One of the most frequent things that people use the contact form for is to attempt to sell us penis enlargement pills. And by frequent, I mean we get a lot of penis enlargement offers. In fact, if we don’t visit our inbox for a while it ends up chock-full of enlarged penises. We aren’t really interested in any of these offers (I have a child now, so I probably won’t even need mine for the next eighteen years or so), but it’s a lot of stuff to wade through and ignore. Well, I say ignore, I’m assuming that my writing partner Jon’s ignoring them too. Perhaps he isn’t, though. Perhaps Jon’s buying penis enlargement pills from everyone that’s offering them. It could be that since we’ve been running 7 Reasons, Jon has purchased so many of these pills that his penis has become a major Kent landmark. Maybe ruddy-faced locals in smocks are staring at his chemically-enhanced appendage right now and pointing up at it with awe. Perhaps it’s on Google Earth. Who knows? One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a major hazard to air travellers as the other thing we get offered almost every day is Viagra.

2. You’ll Get To Read Less Gibberish. When the contact form isn’t trying to enlarge our penises, it sends other stuff too. It sends gibberish. Most things containing the subject heading “7 Reasons Contact Form” look like someone just pressed many keys at once. Frequently, we get the message that “sdkjfkl;sdfjsjsdk;” wrote “sjklsdhfkjsdhfjksdfhsjdfhjlksfsdhthurthw”. This is not helpful. In fact, it’s quite scary that “mgklksfdlgjkhg” writes “mxvnbcxn,bvcxb,mvxc” and “hytfhtyhtfyh” writes “vbnmbmnmbnm” on such a regular basis. Our contact page is fairly dull, but it’s not soporific enough to make this many people doze off on their keyboards while they’re reading it. So perhaps this is just the law of averages. Perhaps one person a day actually falls down dead while looking at our contact form. They’re probably dying when they’re reading other posts too, it’s just that we won’t get to know about that. 7 Reasons could be killing them in their droves: We might be the greatest practitioners of genocide since Pol Pot*. Either that, or – I don’t know – but we only get stuff like this from the contact form, not via email or our comments section.

3. Your Life Will Contain Less Mystery. This morning, via the contact form, we received this question: “When does it start airing?” That’s it. That’s the entire message. But what does it even mean? When does what start airing? Is this an enquiry about my laundry? Is this an enquiry about Jon’s penis? 7 Reasons: The Panel Show? Who knows? Certainly not me, and I don’t want to wake up to a mystery of a morning; I’m not Quincy. I just want to wake up to find that it isn’t raining and that there are coffee beans in the house. I would be able to do that if it weren’t for the contact form.

4. Your Messages Will Go To The Right Person. Above our contact form we clearly direct people that wish to write for us to a different page containing a dedicated email address for guest post submissions. This is a (vain) attempt to try to limit the number of identical submissions we receive about car insurance (purportedly all from different people) and to get them sent directly to Jon – who’s in charge of guest post submissions – rather than to me. He’s more patient than I am. He’s calmer than I am. On receiving his ninth identical offer of a car insurance post in a day, Jon’s veins bulge, he turns red, he emits a sound that is part scream, part bellow and part mating call of a rhinoceros and begins to punch the nearest table or wall. I, on the other hand, don’t take receiving them nearly as well. So there’s no likelihood of these things getting used and we just end up getting rather worked up when we receive them. Well, I do.

5. You’ll Feel Better About Yourself. This is from the contact form:

***** wrote:

Hi

My name is *****.

I would like to ask you if its possible to buy the picture of the lemons in a

high resolution (300ppi 160mm x 200 mm).

And if you have it form a other place can you tell me where?

Greetings *****

This refers to a picture of lemons that – in the same way that approximately 99.99999999% of websites source their pictures – we got from Google Images. There’s no way of replying to this person (that amazingly managed to give us their own name three times during the course of a tiny message) without sounding sarcastic. “Dear *****, we did get it from another place. It is available here. Yours sincerely, the 7 Reasons team” would make us look rather mean.

We’ve also received this:

Do you stock a Thermos type water jug to use on invalids bedside, I can’t find one in cataloues.

That’s just heart-breaking. Could we, in all conscience, send a reply saying “sorry, as a humour website we carry no stock of thermal water jugs, could we tempt you with a mildly Francophobic t-shirt?” No. Of course not. So we either have to spend our time researching random queries from confused people or feel really bad about ourselves.

6. You’ll Hear Less About The Colour Of Hats. The other thing we frequently receive via the cursed contact form are offers of help. Technical help. Traffic driving help. Messages that variously offer to help us “engage strategic initiatives”, “harness value-added solutions”, “integrate visionary partnerships” and “orchestrate bricks-and-clicks infomediaries”. A recent message discoursed for so long about white hat SEO, black hat SEO and grey hat SEO that I almost lost the will to live and – had I been viewing the contact form – I would have been in danger of sending myself a gibberish message with my face. As it was, I began to think about purchasing a hat. What I wasn’t thinking about was taking anyone up on their kind offer to improve our website with their baffling and incomprehensible gobbledygook.

7. You’ll Receive A Better Standard Of Correspondence. Groucho Marx brilliantly and wittily advocated exclusivity when he famously said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, and this can be applied to the Contact Form too. Because the contact form makes us too accessible. It’s too easy to get in touch with us. If it were more difficult to get hold of us, then we’d get a better class of correspondence, because the act of having to do a tiny bit of research to find our contact details and paste them into an email program could well cut out the spammers and raise standards. Perhaps the extra time and effort that this will take will cause people to reflect on whether they really need to contact us at all.

It boils down to this: If you have a contact form, it’s a magnet for spam in all its forms: penis-related-spam; gibberish-spam; spam that consists of bizarre utterances from the mad; spam that shouldn’t even be going to you; spam that is just flabbergasting or heartrending in its naivety; spam about hats. The one thing we rarely receive from the contact us form is any sort of meaningful correspondence. That all comes via email or Twitter. We’re going to be brave; we’re going to be bold: We’ve looked at the correspondence we receive via our contact form, and we’re going to disable it. And if you have a website that has one, we recommend you go back through your inbox and have a look at how much worthwhile correspondence you’ve received through it. We’re guessing it’s not as much as you think.

*The level of interest in our latest competition bears this out.

July 18, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: The Images

Hello! Happy Sunday! (or Friday, if you’re one of the 7 Reasons team editing this post before scheduling it for Sunday)

Images are very important to us here at 7 Reasons and we always try to put them together in-house because, though what we post usually isn’t about an image, there’s always at least one picture attached to what we’ve written. We wanted to communicate the significance that we place on arresting and original visuals to you, so we decided that today we would chose three each of our favourite images from previous posts (plus one we’d used from Google Images by way of contrast) and hold an earnest and thoughtful contemplation of the importance of imagery in our posts and the technical and aesthetic merits of the selected illustrations as pieces of artwork. Obviously we failed, so here’s Marc Fearns and Jonathan Lee bickering about pictures instead.

Hitler’s Hand

Originally used in 7 Reasons That Size is Important.

MF. This is probably my favourite of the images I’ve put together for 7 Reasons. It’s not technically brilliant (in fact, it’s quite flawed), but boring stuff aside, it ticks all of my boxes: It’s black and white; It has Hitler in it; it has some sort of Photoshop-induced oddity (the big hand), and it has a random, bizarre element to it (the triangle apparently embedded in Himmler’s head). If it weren’t for Jon’s civilising influence, 7 Reasons would probably look a lot more like World War II than it does already.

JL. I have a serious problem with this image. It seems to suggest the Nazis were very handy. The Nazis were not very handy. They weren’t even quite handy. The Nazis were rather irritating and quite frankly caused more harm than good. I also have a problem with Himmler. Unlike Marc I am not struck by the triangle in his head, but his the binoculars. Why did Himmler need binoculars? Was he a part time ornithologist? Was he a pervert? Why are they pointing at his trousers? This picture provides more questions than answers. And that I find rather frustrating.

Lamb & Jon Photoshoot

Originally used in 7 Reasons Playing With A Cuddly Toy 2010 Was Not A Let Down.

JL. I like this picture because I look like an idiot. And in this life there just aren’t enough people prepared to be idiots. Sure, there are idiotic people, but that’s by accident. It takes a very special kind of person to deliberately make themselves look like an idiot and I am very proud to say I am very special. It also reminds me of that great day last September with Lamb. Oh, what fun was had. Rock on.

MF. I’m less keen on this picture than Jon. While it does feature a pair of Aviators, which is always a good thing, it’s lacking something quite fundamental. Hitler. Or the war generally. Also, outside of the framing, there barely a straight line in it. And what’s with the archway? What sort of oddball has an archway in their house? And he’s wearing a hat indoors which, as any grandparent would be very keen to point out, is a #manfail. The only thing that makes this image good is the albino monkey.

The Anglo-French Flag

Originally used in 7 Reasons The Anglo-Franco Defence Agreement is a Good Idea

MF. This Anglo-French flag is something that I’m rather proud of. I constructed it from a picture of a British flag, a picture of a French flag and a picture of a silk sheet (which is how I got the creased fluttering effect). It wasn’t even in the post itself, it was the featured image, which means that it appears next to the post on menus as a thumbnail and it was in the Latest Posts window at the top of our home page for five days. You might wonder why I’d go to such an effort to create an image that would be barely seen but, to me anyway, that sort of detail is important, and I like to think that 7 Reasons is all the better for having high standards. That the image of the intertwined British and French flags brought Jon to near-apoplexy is purely coincidence.

JL. As Marc indicates, this picture absolutely disgusts me. I don’t mind the United Kingdom and France joining forces if we are beating up some bad guys, but to merge the Union Jack with the Drapeau Tricolore is nothing less than treason. I have had to ask myself many searching questions since Marc posted this. Should I turn him in? Can I continue to work with him? How the hell did he get that creased fluttering effect? In the end I have allowed Marc to remain living his life in York. The prospect of writing 7 Reasons on a daily basis was just too much to deal with. Rest-assured though, he’s had a warning. A severe one. And, as he’s posted it again, I shall be poking him on facebook too.

Beauty & The Beast

Originally used in 7 Reasons You Should Never Get Cary Grant & Carrie Grant Mixed Up.

JL. Let me clarify one thing, I don’t have a ‘Cary Grant dressed as a woman’ fantasy. I think it’s important to remind you of this now as I can see why you may be thinking such a thing. It’s a disturbing sight. I don’t think there is any getting away from that. So why do I love it? Well that comes down to the photoshopping. Do you know how difficult it is finding a picture of Cary Grant and a picture of Carrie Grant that will go together seemlessly? No, of course you don’t. The consequences of your actions rarely lead you to such an investigation. The consequences of starting 7 Reasons very much do. So, yes, I was delighted that I found two pictures that would work together. It’s not perfect. If I had my time again I would do a bit of work on their skin tones, but for the purpose of the post it did the job. And in 7 Reasons circles that means victory.

MF. For once, I agree with absolutely everything that Jon said about this image. In his third sentence. I do, however, have some observations of my own. Firstly, bloody Twilight: When you’re a vampire and you’re not even the scariest person in the background of a picture, you’re doing it wrong and you should just bloody stop. Secondly, there’s a terrifying bald man wearing an ill-fitting white suit and eyeliner with someone’s severed arm tucked under his own arm. I haven’t slept properly since I saw this. Thirdly, I find Jon’s Cary/Carrie Grant hybrid creature more attractive than the actual Carrie Grant. Or Cary Grant. This is troubling. And Jon never responds to my emails begging him to photoshop more of them.

Lungs, Heart, Asparagus.

Originally used in 7 Reasons That We Should Grow Vegetables in our Lungs.

MF. I put this one together to complement the title of the piece. It’s an original x-ray with the heart and lungs highlighted which I found online and added asparagus to. I’ve chosen this image not just because I’m pleased with the way it turned out, though I am rather. I’ve chosen it because of the almost boundless amusement it gives me every time someone discovers it searching Google Images for x-rays of lungs. I just like knowing that at any given moment someone, somewhere in the world is looking at it thinking, “Blimey! (or perhaps a colloquial equivalent) That looks nasty. I’m going to treat asparagus with more respect now”. I feel certain that one day, this picture will turn up in a medical journal, or on a GP’s surgery wall.

JL. Who eats asparagus whole? Is that even possible? This is just one of the 7 Reasons images that has inspired readers all over the road. A bit like that man in Norwich who – having been so inspired by a post last June – tried to break the world record for number of Jaffa Cakes eaten in one minute and was subsequently sick all over the biscuit aisle. Now, I am not for a minute encouraging you to see how much whole asparagus you can eat at once – that would be highly irresponsible of us – but if you manage more than five I would love to know.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

Originally used in 7 Reasons You Should Always Kiss Properly.

JL. I know what you are thinking, ‘Typical Jon. Two of his three image choices feature him.” Yep, I can’t argue with maths. But let’s look at this photo. At least for as long a you feel comfortable doing so. It is an animated GIF! How bloody exciting! But more than that it is a reminder. A reminder of how far my kissing technique has advanced since last March and – if you’ve been using the above as some kind of guide – how far backwards yours has gone. Lovely stuff.

MF. “AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!” was my initial reaction to this image when I first saw it eleven months ago. And now that I am older, wiser and more mature, on reviewing this image I would say that my reaction is now AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”. Note that Jon has attempted to baffle us with maths to distract from the inherent narcissism of his selections, but let’s consider it carefully. This, as Jon points out, is an animated GIF, so it’s not one picture of him, it’s three pictures of him. This means that four out of Jon’s five image choices are of himself. That’s 80%. Anyway, that aside, I like this picture. On the first occasion I viewed it I remembered that I was supposed to unblock the kitchen sink, and the repeat viewing has caused me to agree with my wife that I spend too long on the internet and I’ve now closed my laptop, sellotaped it shut and placed it under a sofa. With an anvil on top.

Raw Sausages

Originally used in 7 Reasons That December 24th Should be Known as the Day of the Sausage.

MF. Aha! I remember this piece. Sadly, I also remember this picture. It makes me feel sick. It’s not just that the raw former-animal bits are shiny and greasy looking and some of them appear to be inside used condoms, it’s that I don’t even remember which of us added this to the (co-written) piece. I realise what must have been going through the mind of the person that uploaded it. “Sausages! Sausages! We’ve written a piece about sausages and now I need an image of sausages – any image of sausages – right now, to go with the piece about sausages!” And, in the grip of a deadline-panic, that person will have just grabbed the first image of sausages that they saw and attached it to the post. Truly horrible.

JL. This is a perfect example of what one calls, ‘shooting oneself in the foot’. Not that I shot myself, Marc shot me. And himself. And our argument. Using this image kind of reminds me of that day I sent my CV out to dozens of prospective employers and realised a week later that it didn’t contain my contact details. That section about my ‘outstanding attention to detail’ lost all credibility after that. Now, I’m not saying that the idea of the Day of the Sausage lost credibility with the inclusion of this image, just that – if such a day ever was created – Marc and I would not be part of the marketing team. And that’s sad.

January 30, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: Blimey! It’s The Future. Now.
Last week, 7 Reasons took a step backward. We went back in time to the antediluvian age of print when our words – if not our names – appeared in Esquire magazine. How can we top that, we wondered. The present will just seem humdrum now. So we decided to ignore the present and plan for the future.

In historical envisaging of the future, it’s all hoverboards, cars that fly and spangly jumpsuits. But it’s fast becoming clear that the true instrument of the future will be the Kindle. That’s how things will be read in years to come. We determined that the way forward for 7 Reasons was to embrace the Kindle and prepare for it. Well, Jon thought that we should wear spangly jumpsuits and LED watches, but fortunately he lost the coin-toss.

So we’ve got together with the people at Amazon and we’ve made it happen. From today, we have a new thing:

That’s right Kindlers, 7 Reasons is now available on your Kindles. So when you’re out there Kindling in your futuristic world of the future, you need never miss a single 7 Reasons post. They’ll just appear on your Kindle via the combined mediums of witchcraft, space-age jiggery-pokery and the wireless internet. You can subscribe to 7 Reasons : Kindle Edition here; you can even have a free 14 day trial. For the rest of us backward peasants there’ll still be the old-fashioned website but you, Kindlers, the beautiful people of the future, will be experiencing 7 Reasons in many amazing ways.

Things the beautiful-future-people will be able to do with their Kindles:
- Read 7 Reasons in direct sunlight.
- Read 7 Reasons for hours and hours without straining their eyes.
- Spot 7 Reasons spelling-mistakes with their built-in dictionary (but not as a drinking game, a post by Jon could prove fatal).
- Be better than the rest of us.
- Think of a witty and brilliant fifth thing.
Things that the rest of us will be able to do without Kindles:
- Stand in mud.
- Eat a raw turnip.
- Point at the beautiful-future-people.
- Lick a fetid dog.
- Wail with despair and cry until our souls hurt.
So, that’s the future: Available now. 7 Reasons will return tomorrow in many forms. Like the Devil.
January 16, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: Badges

A long, long time ago, way back in the mists of 7 Reasons(.org) history, Jon promised that there would be badges for guest posters, and Marc rolled his eyes and said, “SHH! You’ll bankrupt us before we’ve even started.” But now, many months – possibly even a whole year later – we have an announcement to make about badges for guest posters.

We’ve never forgotten the promised badges, and just recently we took another look into the 7 Reasons coffers (once we’d located them in a dusty ante-room) to see if badges were now feasible. As we expectantly lifted the heavy wooden lid of our treasure chest it creaked with reassuring portent and, with the light of our torches to guide us, we peered into the interior of the dark, gloomy box.

To say that we were amazed by what we found there would be an understatement. After we had emptied the contents of the chest into a pile on the floor and methodically totalled it up, we were staggered.

So now, we can announce that the 7 Reasons Badge Fund stands at…(drum-roll)…(go on, just bang on the desk, no one will think you’re mad)…half a dead spider, a creased Post-it® note, the crumbs from several ginger nut biscuits, twelve business cards, a mug with a broken handle and a lemon. Plus some blue stuff that neither of us wanted to touch.

But necessity is the mother of invention and we’re nothing if not creative here so we’ve made badges anyway. For free. In Photoshop. So if you write (or have written) for us, you can now have a 7 Reasons Guest Writer badge simply by sending us a photograph of yourself. And we’ll send it back with your badge on it.

Not only will this help us achieve our goal of not running 7 Reasons at a loss one day, it’s also far more environmentally friendly than an actual, physical badge, which benefits the whole world. So the virtual badge is something worthy, it’s a force for good. It’s actually saving penguins.

A guest poster has already taken us up on our virtual badge offer (in fact, it’s what convinced him to write for us in the first place). Here is Sir Andrew Straussy jubilantly wearing his:

And here’s an owl wearing his (because one day, we hope to convince an owl to write for us (and the virtual badge is less cruel than an actual one)).

We also sent (to the lady herself) a picture of Jennifer Aniston wearing a badge and we received this in return.

So this probably means that marriage is still out of the question.

Anyway, the point of all of these badge-related-shenanigans is to mention that we’re currently looking for more guest posts. So, if you’ve never written for us, or if you have; if you have an idea, or even half an idea (because that’s how we work most of the time), then please get in touch.

We have always felt genuinely honoured and flattered that brilliant people, who write to such a high standard, have submitted pieces for us to use, and we hope that – one day – we will be able to reward their endeavours with something more tangible than our thanks, our admiration and our love (which, to be honest may put people off). Perhaps in the form of a badge, perhaps in the form of money, perhaps we will build a shrine, who knows? Anyway, however we decide to reward guest posters when we are dripping with the riches of Croseous, the fact remains that we aren’t right now, but we do feel genuinely humble – and honoured – that people read us regularly and that people allow us to use their work.

Anyway, if you fancy earning yourself some thanks, some publicity and a virtual badge then email [email protected]. We don’t promise to use everything that’s sent to us (because, well, we might not like it, and if we didn’t have standards, then we wouldn’t feel proud of our own website ). We will always consider it, however, and are happy to offer guidance or advice, where solicited.

Here’s a brief guide to writing a post for us. Thanks,

Marc and Jon.

December 5, 2010
7 Reasons That Writer’s Block is Frustrating

Whether you’re a blogger, a journalist, a novelist, a playwright or a poet, writer’s block can be both debilitating and frustrating. Here are seven reasons why.

Yes, It's Microsoft Word 1897!

1. Because You Call Yourself A Writer. I sometimes call myself a writer. Mostly because that’s what I do. I write. Every day. I didn’t start doing it regularly until my thirties, but I’ve studied literature my whole life, from pre-school to university. And I feel comfortable when I refer to myself as a writer; because I do it all the time and, I like to imagine, quite well. I don’t make my living from writing: I’ve never even been paid for writing; in fact – owing to the vagaries of the publishing system – I’ve been offered more money not to write than I have to write. Yes, actual soft cash (made of paper, so better than hard cash), and I turned it down. Because I’m an idiot. And I would have had to have called myself a not-writer. A professional not-writer. And that’s not who I am. But you can only call yourself a writer if you actually write something.

2. Because It’s Hard To Explain. It’s hard to explain not being able to write to non-writers, because – to them – it’s a natural state. How would you explain the absence of writing to someone that isn’t a practitioner of the art? I’ll have a stab at it: Imagine that you’re reading a blank page. But that page is important. In fact, the words on that page are fundamental to your very life, soul, being, self-image and existence. But you can’t see them. And you need them. They’re vital. Oh, and you’re naked. Well that’s pretty much what it’s like. But much worse. Because your foot hurts and it’s cold where you are.

3. Because You Can Think Of Things To Write, They’re Just Not Appropriate. I could, right at this moment, fashion a discourse highlighting the influence of John Mayall on the British blues movement or analyse Romania’s under-reported role in the holocaust. But I’m not writing a piece on the development of British music, or on World War II, I’m writing for a humour site. Which is a shame as there’s very little else in my head except for: “There’s nothing in your head you silly man”, “My foot hurts” and “Oooh, I quite fancy a sandwich”; yet eating the sandwich won’t help you because…well…it’s eating a sandwich, which is different to writing (it’s more Marmitey and less like Tolstoy) and your audience probably won’t appreciate a piece entitled 7 Reasons I Stopped Staring Blankly at a Screen and had a Sandwich Instead as it would be at least six reasons light and it would probably make them hungry. Well, half of them, the other half probably don’t like Marmite.

4. Because You Have A Deadline. Yes, there’s always a deadline that you need to hit. And, when I was staring at my blank screen it was imminent. After all, I have other things to do in addition to writing. I’m a man, I need simple things; that sandwich, sleep, words to magically appear on my screen (or in my head, I’m not lazy, I’ll happily type them out), but mostly sleep. Because I’ve been busy all day and I’m tired. But I need to write these words, so with bloodshot eyes I continue to stare at the screen, because inspiration will strike if I stare at it for long enough, surely?

5. Because Of Modern Technology. And I’m staring at the blank screen on a computer. That’s right, a computer. A machine connected to the world that contains many, many distractions. So when you find yourself failing to write words on a screen, you’ll soon find yourself watching people falling off bicycles on Youtube. And shortly, you’ll find yourself on Twitter. Not tweeting about WWII or John Mayall, but about other topical and funny stuff. And you’re actually being funny on Twitter. In the written word! But not in any way that inspires your next day’s piece, and that doesn’t help matters; in fact, it’s bloody frustrating, as the irony of the situation won’t escape you. You will briefly toy with the idea of tweeting tomorrow’s piece, and disregard it. Eventually. But not before you’ve wasted much precious writing time considering it, while sucking on a pencil: A pencil without any lead in it.

6. Because Of Self-Doubt. Why do I write? If you ever found yourself asking that, you would never, ever do it. Because writing defies all logical sense. Why, in the name of all that is holy, in the name of all that is unholy, or in the name of all that isn’t there (I think I’ve covered everyone) would anyone choose to spend their time spewing-forth words from their brains to their fingers to their screens. “I could be doing other things at the moment,” you’ll find yourself thinking. “I could be doing other things that normal people do like watching other people sitting in a “jungle” or watching other people dancing badly or watching other people that can’t sing, sing or”…and suddenly writing makes sense again.

7. Because You’ll Get There In The End. And eventually, you’ll think of something to write about. Because that’s what you do, you’re a writer. Even if you do end up writing about not-writing, even if you end up raw-eyed and sweaty, even if you end up writing with the rapier-like-insight and élan of an addled baboon, there’ll be something. Because however much you think you have nothing to say, however hard you think it is, there will always be something. And that’s when you know that you should write. And that you should have a shower.

November 23, 2010