So recently there I was kibbitzing at the house of an old freind when she grappled my elbow with one hand clammy with Scriber's Fervor (not an antonym of Writer's Block; it's what happens when people who write get to enthuse about the *tools* of writing - and when was the last time you got buttonholed by a writer about a really sexy new eraser he just saw in Popular Mechanics) and -

Blew my mind. Sure, it was Harry Potter fan fiction, but under the regard / goading of a rabid audience, she had written *a freaking novel,* and I mean around 400 pages, of faculty antics at Hogwart's in, oh, about a month.

Huh.

At the rate I've been going, my own stories, screenplays etc will be finished right around when a meerket-descended paleontology student brushes the rock dust carefully away from the fossil impression of my hard drive.

With a trembling hand he reached over to the mouse, grunting something simultaneously laudatory and faintly sinister at the benign sponsors of joeuser.com, and began his recollection of the bizarreness of the mundane...