Secret of success: Round tuits.

My brand-new blog has already drawn comment. Someone wants to know who I am. Here’s the short version:

I’m 32 years old and I’ve got no wife, no kids, no car, no DVD player, no TV, no hot water, no insurance policy, no pension plan, not enough sense not to be a freelance writer, and lots more besides. Some people call me Jack the Hack, and so can you, if you want.

I’m doing okay as a freelance writer, although of course I speak in relative terms, and doing okay at this game does not entail security for the future, much less fast cars and fast women. Sitting here at my tripewriter.

How did this happen? One day I’m sitting there with a beer, a callow youth, wondering what I’ll do when I grow up. The next thing I know, I’m sitting here going prematurely gray and stupid and still wondering what I’ll do when I grow up. I’m busy as can be churning out millions of words written on the wind, and some would say that’s a waste of wind, watching the prance of brochure copy across the page, serving up florid blandishments for commercial hucksters with a fine contempt for the meaning of words.

It’s hard to tell, just looking at me, that I’m secretly the author of a pile of deathless prose that only awaits my getting a round tuit. I only hope I don’t spend the rest of my life singing this same song, and that I actually somehow find the formula that allows me to churn out a bunch of fiction at the same time I’m having a good time and eating and not dying poor and everything. The real secret is acquiring a round tuit. With one of these items, there’s no limit to what I might not accomplish.

I am a foreign correspondent and a columnist. I’m a writer and I’m a freelance journalist. I have seven pen-names, and in fact I’m a hack, a two-bit panderer to any passing proposition. I am a full-fledged author, my life-long ambition, never mind I never have time to write anything. Not only that, but I’m practically a celebrity. Probably a dozen people have heard of me already, and one of them was a cute girl who looked at me kind of funny. Maybe she was a groupie.