Everybody’s a writer nowadays
Jean: “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
Pat: “Just a minute…I’m writing a book.”
Jean: “Okay…wait, writing or reading?”
Pat: “Writing: sh! Aaaaaannnnnndddd…done! Whew! What did you want to ask me?”
Jean: “I forget. What did you mean you were writing a book?”
Pat: “What does it sound like it means? I just finished my tenth novel.”
Jean: “I didn’t know you were a writer.”
Pat: “I’m breathing, aren’t I? 
Everybody’s a writer nowadays.”
Jean: “I’m not.”
Pat: “Sure you are. We’re having a conversation, right?”
Jean: “Right.”
Pat: “You didn’t memorize what you were going to say ahead of time, right? It’s not a script?”
Jean: “Of course not.”
Pat: “There you go…you just wrote some dialog.”
Jean: “That’s not writing. That’s just…speaking.”
Pat: “Tomato, tomahto. It’s really the same thing. The only difference is that I’ve been published.”
Jean: “Who published you?”
Pat: “I did.”
Jean: “Huh. Oh, I remembered what I wanted to ask you! Can I borrow twenty bucks?”
Pat: “Yep…let me check. I can give you nineteen dollars right now…should have twenty in another minute or so.”
Jean: “How come?”
Pat: “Royalties. See, as soon as I finished writing the book, I published it. People have been buying it, and those are my royalties…yep, I can loan you twenty!”
Jean: “Cool…I don’t get this whole book thing, though.”
Pat: “It’s simple. I just wear this hat…it’s internet-connected, and it reads my mind.”
Jean: “Of course it does.”
Pat: “Technically, it’s BMI…a brain/machine interface. I think about what happens in the story, and my Hatway puts it into words, makes it available on the web, and collects the money.”
Jean: “You thought of all the words in ten books?”
Pat: “No, I told you…the Hatway puts it into words. I just think about what happens.”
Jean: “So your hat writes the book?”
Pat: “No, no, no! A hat can’t write a book. Besides, a BMI can’t read specific words. I picture the characters, and decide what they do. The Hatway uses parts of other books to put together the dialogs and descriptions and junk.”
Jean: “Is that legal?”
Pat: “Sure…it only uses books that aren’t under copyright.”
Jean: “Who would want to read a book that’s just parts of a bunch of other books?”
Pat: “Wow, you really don’t read, do you? Most books are just parts of other books. You’d be hard-pressed to find 50,000 unique words…and if you did, people probably wouldn’t understand it or like it.”
Jean: “I guess you’re right. But isn’t using a…um…hat like that sort of cheating?”
Pat: “That’s up to the market to decide…and so far, they don’t seem to be objecting. Look, either I read a lot of books, and then put the same sentences together in different order, or the Hatway does it…it’s the same thing, just more efficient.”
Jean: “I suppose. Couldn’t the Hatway do the same thing with plots? You know, find scenes and stuff and just stitch those together?”
Pat: “Now you are just insulting what I do as an author. Are you sure you don’t need $25? I just hit the bestseller list…”
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
