I’m a crappy writer.

Every story I’ve ever written is crap. Even the ones that have been published. The editors who bought my stories were blind on the days they read my stories, or they were simply charitable. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.

My novel, The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster, is a pile of dung. It stinks. It smells. Surely my friend Terrie can smell its stench even in her home in Tokyo. Keri can smell it in Northern Ireland. It is truly foul. It’s going nowhere. The plot is limp, the characters lifeless. My use of language is abhorrent and completely uninspired.

Bleah. Barf. Yuck.

Who told me I could be a writer? Why on earth did I believe them?

I should do something more productive, with a higher chance of success. Like, maybe, collecting dust mites. I’m sure that there are plenty of different species of dust mites from all over the world. I could have the largest collection of dust mites that the world has ever seen, big enough to rival the dust mite collection at the Royal Natural History Museum in London, should they have one. I could label them with tiny little labels, and provide a microscope for the dozens of people from all over the world who would want to see them, for surely more people would be interested in viewing my dust mite collection than would ever be interested in reading the stories and novels that I inflict upon the world.

I could be a firefighter, I suppose, except my asthma would not be able to handle the smoke. Maybe a police officer, though I think I’m too old to qualify. I don’t know; I know that police departments aren’t allowed to have minimum height restrictions anymore; are they allowed to have age restrictions these days?

Truly, as a writer I sucketh.

* * *

Okay, that’s out of my system. Time to get back to writing.