ome people have muses. Some people have girls in the basement. I don’t have any of those. I have dog biscuit gods.

See, you wouldn’t know it to look at — well, to look at my resume, for instance, but I’m actually not very smart. It’s all an illusion. Since, I’m, um, pseudonymous, you can’t actually look at my resume, so I’ll just have to sketch in the details and hope you understand that this isn’t supposed to be boasting. Ever since I figured out how to channel the dog biscuit gods (approximately age 20? who knows these days?), I have been alarmingly successful. It’s alarming to me because success is supposed to come only to those who work hard and are smart, and I am lazy and stupid.

Due to this alarming success, I have accidentally managed to do things like, um, get the highest grades in . . . um . . . all my classes. I accidentally got a double major in two hard sciences, and I accidentally went to graduate school and got a graduate degree in one of those, and I accidentally went and did another graduate-level degree after that, both degrees at places that would reasonably be considered reasonably competitive. I’m using the word accident a lot, but in any event, somehow or other I managed to accidentally end up with all this stuff on my resume which pretty much amounts to a golden ticket for whatever I want in my other profession.
The truth is that I am a fraud. I am not very smart. I don’t work hard at all. In fact, throughout school, my secret to success looked like this:

Step One: This is hard. I have no clue how to do it. I am doomed.
Step Two: I give up. I shall go read a romance novel.

Step Three: That was lovely. Wait — now I get it! This is what’s going on.

As I’m sure you can tell, I am lucky enough to have a direct channel to the Dog Biscuit Gods. What I do is lay out problems for them, basically chucking the whole problem into my subconscious as if I were tossing dog biscuits into a dark yard late at night. Then, I shut the back door and let them alone by reading novels.  While I’m otherwise occupied, the gods come out and snuff out the dog biscuits. And then, when I am finished with the romance novel in question, I go back and look, and lo and behold, someone has eaten my dog biscuits and left me answers instead. Yay! Thanks, Dog Biscuit Gods.
The Dog Biscuit Gods are equal-opportunity eaters. They don’t care if the problem is physics or metaphysics. They’ll eat anything. And you have to be very, very careful about what you feed them. Sometimes, you’ll really really want to figure out your homework, and so you’ll go and read a romance novel, and then you’ll discover that what you were thinking about in the back of your mind was how hungry you were, and so when you finish your romance novel and go check for a solution to your homework, what you have instead is a really awesome recipe for pasta that uses all the leftover stuff in your fridge. And then you have to go read another romance novel just so you can get your homework done. After you eat, of course.
(I’m really not kidding about this. Also, the Dog Biscuit Gods named themselves. I had nothing to do with it.)

In any event, the Dog Biscuit Gods are going crazy over this whole writing a novel thing. They’re just yapping up a storm. They love it. But it’s really annoying, because sometimes I really, really need them to deal with my Actual Job. You know, the stuff I get paid for. I ask them these questions very politely. “How can we satisfy X and Y?” I ask. Or “Can Z possibly be true?” And “What shall we do about epsilon?”
What I get back are these really kick-ass titles for new books, complete with major plotlines and omniscient crabs. I shake my head in despair.