I write.

And invariably, when I tell people this, I’m (at the very least) regarded with suspicion. I don’t really know why – it’s not contagious.

Oh wait, you write too? Oh, you want to… I see… uh-huh… Wow, yeah. Interesting. You should really go for it.

But you know what? It’s not interesting. And it’s actually not an amazing idea at all. You know, the one you’ve been sitting on all these years; the one about the aliens coming here with their advanced farming practices, and the twin brothers with diametrically opposed personalities, and how the whole thing’s really just a social commentary on how we are killing our planet, and that if we don’t learn how to get along, that soon it will all be too late? Yeah, that one.

Sure, I’m nodding and looking kind of interested, but every man past the age of eighteen knows how to fake that. Women do it with orgasms: men do it with conversation.

No, your story idea doesn’t sound all that entertaining or even vaguely marketable these days. But if you’d like to step inside my time machine and head for the early 1950s – when your plot wasn’t a thinly-veiled cliche; your protagonist wasn’t a cut-and-paste job from every sci-fi story ever written; and your political/ecological resolution didn’t depend on the reader missing a plot-hole you could pilot the Millenium Falcon through – then I’m sure you’ll make millions. But, quite frankly, the only thing that would make the idea any less enticing to prospective publishers is if you told me the whole thing was a dream…

Oh right, so he wakes up at the end? Uh-huh, I understand.

Yeah. Good luck with that. It sounds awesome.