Almost anyone can write a mystery novel. The problem is, even with all the advice manuals on the shelves of bookstores, nobody tells you how to live your life after you've made the decision to be a mystery novelist. It's one thing to read about characterization and plotting and all that peripheral stuff. It's quite another to read what writers actually do with their time.

Because I'm a mystery writer, I don't have time to write a manual for new authors on how to live their lives, but I will, as a service, provide a short list here in the hope of providing quick spiritual guidance. You'll see why I don't have time for extra writing as you make your way through the following . . .

How to Stay Active While Bound by Duct Tape to a Chair That Is Chained to a Desk and Wired to Emit 50,000 Volts of Especially Nasty Electricity If You Try To Escape

1. Stare at the ceiling and wonder if Svengali really ate bacon with chocolate cake.

2. Call your agent and ask what the weather's like in New York. He'll appreciate hearing from you.

3. Flop around like an eel on a fiberglas boat if a family member turns on the TV or asks you what's for dinner.

4. If you're John Grisham, type the following sentence, but don't revise it. "The law firm of Kravitz, Englander, MacIntyre, and Butch had almost 500 lawyers coexisting under the same roof in Memphis, 491 to be exact, and they had all been recruited as bright third-year students with high marks in kangaroo trials, but even with offices in eight cities, the firm billed only third in Memphis because, much to the chagrin of the older partners, the letterhead did not have a single Paris address, and although there was a nice small unit for personal injury work, good stuff from which they took 75 percent and allowed their clients the remainder, all the really big clients took their business elsewhere when they saw the detailed map of the Cayman Islands on the wall of the reception room in the old building on the river." (See The Legal Thriller).

5. Turn down the volume on your computer and surf the Web.

6. Do everything in units of ten. Promise yourself ten times that you will write ten pages. In about ten minutes, tell yourself that you will definitely write about ten paragraphs. Well, okay, write the ten words you like best. If you can't think of ten, recite the alphabet out loud and choose ten letters that sound cool.

   Or see if there are ten different ways to spell the letter "Q." There are! Cue, queue, kew, c'you, chue, kyoo, The 17th letter of the English Alphabet, Q.(abbr.), the first part of the phrase that ends with "and A.", a typo for "clue."

7. Nap.

8. Study the advantages of using a pseudonym.

9. Imagine what it would be like to have a postage stamp with your face on it.

10. Switch the words around in your title, assuming you've gotten that far in the novel.

11. When you need a respite from the grueling labor already described above, write a long dedication. See if you can get it to rhyme.

12. When you finish the dedication, write an exercise paragraph in which you kill your own protagonist, just to see if that does anything to relieve the itching caused by the duct tape.

13. Starve.

14. Which reminds you that you have already spent the publisher's advance on lottery tickets. Write the book.

Submitted by Polly Whitney, insert the date yourself. Use this moment as a creative exercise — figure out what the date would be on Mars.