Life Hacks For Hacks

Put pancake mix into a ketchup bottle for easy squeezing. This will give you more time to write forced, unnatural dialogue.

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Use a dustpan handle to easily funnel water into a bucket. Better yet, use a dustpan handle to fill a bucket with the tears of authors from whom you’ve plagiarized. Tell no one about this bucket.

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Eliminate stubborn bathtub stains with a halved grapefruit. As you’re scrubbing, consider your irritating habit of stringing together dozens of adjectives in a single sentence. The stains will become translucent and small and manageable and inspired and vulnerable and terrible and refreshed and big and empty and whole and blue-ish and green-ish and superfluous and cool and loud and soft and nauseous and uncertain and so, so certain all at the same time.

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Waterproof your shoes with beeswax. Then, have one of your characters waterproof their shoes with beeswax. This will add just enough quirk to disguise the fact that the character is a hollow, unimaginative shell.

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Toss a few ice cubes into the dryer to remove wrinkles from the Joseph A. Bank sport coat you purchased for your author photo. Readers will be so distracted by your tidy coat and pompous stare that they will skim right over your formulaic nightmare prose.

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Keep your batteries organized in plastic soap containers. Re-organize your batteries every time you’re tempted to use a literary cliche. Thinking of typing the words “dark and stormy night?” Re-organize your batteries. Considering using violence against women as an easy plot device? Re-organize your batteries, then chop off your hand.

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Replace your hand with the dustpan handle from earlier. Honestly, does a writer of your caliber even need hands? The adjectives seem to flow right onto the page from your big, big brain.

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Use the dustpan handle to carefully self-publish your book, then update your LinkedIn title to read: “Published Author; Poor Man’s Kerouac.”

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Parade through the streets hooting, “I am a published author and available for consulting!” Use the dustpan handle to fight off stray dogs as you parade through the streets.

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Return to your home to find that it’s been vandalized by the victims of your plagiarism. Attach a slice of bread to your dustpan handle to absorb the tiny shards of shattered window glass.

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Use a pair of folded sunglasses as a makeshift phone stand. After propping up your phone, keep an eye out for passersby, then lean out of the shattered window frame and scream into the phone, “You made how many millions of dollars after paying for my writing consultation services?!”

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The stray dogs are back. Quickly rub a walnut on your wooden furniture to cover up dings, then fling the walnut at the dogs as they leap through your window frame. Remind them that you are a published author as they snarl and salivate, snatching small chunks of your flesh. Flail helplessly as they devour you in your own home, showering the collected works of James Patterson with your sticky innards.

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Use a muffin tin to serve condiments at a barbecue.

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