I had a dilemma. I knew that the average white male lives to be about 74. Being a white male approaching my mid-30s and also being about as average as you can get, I became acutely aware that I was marching steadily toward the 50-yardline of my life. I called myself a writer, and, to some extent, I was. I'd written more than 100 gags for cartoons that were published in more than 600 newspapers worldwide. I'd had humor essays and features published in magazines locally and nationally. All of that was very nice, but I was looking to do something, well, huge.

By the time they were in their mid-30s, Bobby Kennedy was US Attorney General, Castro had taken over Cuba, Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence, Babe Ruth hit more than 500 home runs, and Mozart-- well, when he was my age, he was dead. Talk about a wake-up call. It was time for me to do something important -- perhaps even more important than those other guys. And so I decided I would write books for children.

I picked up a copy of Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market. Figuring it might take me six months or so to find a publisher and a year or two to have it illustrated, bound and distributed, that would put me around age 36, a full year on the sunny side of that half-way mark I mentioned above. I was now ready to set about the business of imparting both my wisdom and insights to the wee folks of the world. Now I had another dilemma. How would I become both wise and insightful in the next few weeks which I'd budgeted for writing?

If Henry Kissinger wanted to write a book, it would probably be about politics, history or diplomacy. Henry Ford could've written the definitive text on assembly line production or how automobiles changed America forever. But what would I write about?

I spent so many years in elementary school, I had my own parking space. As an adult, I've proven to be horrible at home repair, bad at baseball, crummy at cooking, and lousy at landscaping. I'm sure my kids could add to this list. I'm not just sub-par in one or two areas -- I'm a true renaissance man when it comes to incompetence. I don't have an MBA, CPA or a Ph. D. . . .I'm just a guy with the IQ of a BLT who barely knows his ABCs, and is full of BS on topics from A to Z. Upon examining my myriad of shortcomings, it dawned on me; I'd write a book that was funny.

Learning through humor is a fun way to teach and a fun way to learn, but the real reason I wrote a series of funny books is simple; I'm a funny guy. Here's my simple rule for writing, whether it's for children, adults, or puppies:

If you're not an expert on Somalia, basket weaving, chess, origami or badminton before you sit down in front of the keyboard, you won't become one at that moment. The moral? Play to your strengths.

Write about stuff you know about, or things about which you're passionate. This isn't a job, it's a gig. And gigs are meant to be fun. If writing becomes the same kind of tedious task that the rest of the world busies themselves with, you may as well take a side job making widgets in a factory. The pay will be better, there's certainly more security, and you probably won't look at every single widget you make and think the world has never seen anything so loathsome.

Why not take that route? Because you're a writer, that's why. You are a link in a chain that reaches back centuries connecting Socrates, the apostles, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Jane Austen and Joan Collins.

If you've written a book, you've done the hard part. Now do the easy part and put it in front of publishers. When I did, I received so many rejection slips that our mail carrier got a hernia. Then I went from having no books published to having seven accepted in the course of four months.

In the words of Shel Silverstein, "Anything can happen child, anything can be."