The Most Humbling Occupation

So what do you think is the most humbling occupation on the planet?

I know, your knee-jerk response is something like Dunkin Donuts donut server. I say a much more humbling vocation is Novelist.

Think about it, it's relatively easy to climb to an extremely high position at Dunkin Donuts - or even go straight to the top. All you have to do is not ask five questions after I have already audibly ordered a black medium coffee no sugar: Medium? Black? Sugar? To go? Bag?

Cup? Styrofoam? Socialism? The meaning of life?

As Novelist, one might think that a job where hundreds or thousands spend ten or twenty hours reading or pretending to read your words or your editor's words would provide a moderately noticeable pimple of a bump to one's ego. But one would be wrong.

Humility is knowledge of the inconceivability of attaining greatness. And as a Novelist you don't have a glass of water's chance in a pretzel factory at getting to Top Dog. That is, so long as Harlan Coben is still writing. And his billions of books sold aren't all rounded up into the world's biggest incinerator. And incinerated.

Harlan Coben does to prose what Cheez Wiz does to cauliflower. He makes weaker authors weep with his heart-thumping pace and good-as-there settings. His characters are so real that you can smell their rank breath, or feel the gentle tug of lipstick stained teeth on your earlobe. He is, in one man, all things to all languages. The thin refraction of his almighty light in even the shoddiest of Divehi, Bhutan or Flemish translations can outshine the brightest of World Literature.

I can only imagine if Harlen Coben was around in the days of Shakespeare, what that lukewarm transcriber of history and myth would have done in the midst of suigeneris plot alchemists like Harlan Coben or his only peer in any age, Robin Cook. Oh, but please don't think that my mention of Robin Cook means that he can even touch the quill (if he was in Shakespeare's time) or preferred (according to Writer's Life Monthly) Compaq Presario notebook computer of the one, timeless Harlen Coben.

Why even type another wo...