Cookie Ten

Ten Chinese Cookie Fortunes, and What They Really Mean for Writers

Don't ask, don't say. Everything lies in silence.

Just shut up and take it. Everyone loved Helen Keller, right?

Failure is the chance to do better next time.

Burn the book of your heart and write something else, or we're going to hurt you.

It is better to deal with problems before they arise.

The first time your internal editor thinks you should go back and rewrite chapter one instead of writing chapter two, tell her to piss off.

Plan for many pleasures ahead.

You won't get them, but you need something to write in your journal besides long riffs off the topics of "Why does everyone hate me?" and "Publishing will never understand my genius."

Someone is speaking well of you.

Someone wants a quote for their new book.

There is a true and sincere friendship between you and your friends.

Writer friendships are like condoms: tight and secure-feeling in the beginning, thin and easy to break in the middle, and messy and emminently disposable at the end.

Today it's up to you to create the peacefulness you long for.

Get off the internet before it sucks your brains out of your skull.

Whenever possible, keep it simple.

That sex scene where they're doing it while juggling a bomb between trapezes as the antagonist and his small army shoots at them? Has to go.

You will witness a special ceremony.

First you'll pay two thousand dollars, be squashed in economy class for three hours, eat lousy chicken entrees, listen to boring speakers, stay in a room with cigarette burns on the carpet and roaches in the lavatory for four days straight before the night you finally learn that you did not kiss enough ass to win that coveted genre award. And then you'll have to congratulate the beaming suckup who did. But hey, you got to hang with some of your writer friends, right?

Your flair for the creative takes an important place in your life.

You'll need some cute buttons to put on your uniform suspenders when you go to work at TGI Fridays.