Hooked on a feeling

I don't know what the topic of the email was, but on the advertising bar of Gmail today I saw this:

I couldn't resist clicking on it, and wound up at a site with a big advertisement for, not software, but a "course" that promised to teach how to write any book in less than a month. I was particularly tickled by the description of the "Master Writer" behind the course:

Living in his luxurious English home, Nick Daws has been a full-time writer for over 12 years. He enjoys a life of holidaying with his beautiful wife, playing his part as a regional celebrity, and occasionally putting finger to keyboard to write another book.

Oh, la. Eet ees almost too much to touch ze keyboard and write yet anozzer book.

Then there are some of the "WRITING SECRETS no-one has yet told you about":

How to only ever write in FIVE MINUTE segments, so you never lose interest!

Hey, that's just how I do my technical writing. I work for five minutes, then walk around for another five minutes, then force myself back to my desk. I'm starting to get the idea here. You can also learn:

...an ingenious method of injecting instant scene setting into your books, using just two extra words.

Hmm... could they be adjectives? Turning the sentence "He walked across the street" into "He walked across the windy busy street" certainly does inject instant scene-setting.

Why characters are KEY to any book -- fiction and non-fiction!

The course is "your key to a superior lifestyle, 'celebrity' status and industry kudos," an enlightened state further described like this:

Perhaps you're doing it for fame, or the money. It could be you just want to become an industry guru and boost your career. Or it's possible you simply want to become the talking point of a party by introducing yourself as a writer.

Emphasis theirs. I can just see someone reading this and imagining attending a cocktail party where people are whispering to each other "Look -- there's the writer! How I envy him!"

I read much of this out loud today at work to the other technical writers, most of whom are also in writing groups and are working on novels in their spare time. We had a pretty good chuckle. Because the fact is, we are making good money as writers -- minus the scene-setting and the characters, unless the "Transaction Tracer" or the "Report Template Creation Wizard" can be thought of as characters.

Want to really make good money as a writer? There are courses, all right -- like this. But never mind being a celebrity.