A dear friend of mine — a better writer than I am — recently asked me how I manage to produce serviceable humor pieces with what appears to be blinding speed.

To understand the answer, you would have had to meet my Aunt Ivie.

During World War Two, Aunt Ivie served in the Canadian Armed Services as a typist.

Somewhere along the way it was discovered that she was reportedly the fastest typist in the entire British Empire.

She could hit 190 words per minute with no errors.

On a manual typewriter.

Children today have no idea what that means.

Those old machines were not keyboards.

They were industrial farming equipment disguised as office supplies.

The keys fought back.

The ribbons smudged.

The typebars jammed together like drunken elk.

There was no delete key.

No spellcheck.

No autocorrect.

No magical little red line under the word embarrassment.

If you made a serious typo, sometimes you had to retype the entire page.

Meanwhile some chain-smoking colonel was standing nearby demanding casualty reports by noon.

And Aunt Ivie apparently sat there hammering away like a machine gun nest in Belgium.

I can type around 170 words a minute myself — although with substantially more errors and considerably less imperial glory.

I can also dictate at around 150 words per minute, though by the end I begin sounding like a man auctioning livestock during a windstorm.

They say the average adult speaks around 150 words a minute.

Apparently even elderly people can maintain surprisingly high speaking speeds if properly motivated.

At my age, motivation usually involves either writing something funny or locating a bathroom.

Are you still with me?

Or are you moving your lips while reading?

Anyway, my average post runs around 750 words.

Once I get an idea, through a combination of genetic malfunction, caffeine, old newspaper habits, and whatever radioactive particles struck Alberta during the Cold War, I can usually blast out 800 words very quickly.

Of course, my draft overflows with spelling errors, broken punctuation, repeated phrases, missing words, and the occasional sentence that appears to have been translated from Bulgarian.

Then comes AI.

I run the fractured draft through ChatGPT, which cleans up the mess in about thirty seconds and transforms my literary car crash into something mostly readable.

About two years ago I hired — or possibly tricked — a fellow in Pakistan into building me a simple WordPress template.

The system asks for three things:

• Title
• Text
• Image

The image is now the slowest part.

AI usually takes around forty seconds to generate one.

Before AI, getting illustrations for posts cost me at least fifty bucks, two weeks of waiting, and usually ended with a graphic artist explaining why my idea was impossible because “the lighting motivation lacked emotional cohesion.”

Then came the arguments.

Lots of arguments.

Now a machine creates an angry billionaire riding a flaming alpaca through Beverly Hills in under a minute.

Progress is beautiful.

So if everything goes according to plan, I can produce a complete post in roughly six minutes.

Of course, there are still occasional disasters.

Sometimes the AI gives me six fingers.

Sometimes it makes elderly women look twenty-three.

Sometimes it produces images that appear to have been painted by Salvador Dalí during a power outage.

But overall, the process is astonishing.

Years ago I also depended on friends and often a sleepy wife to proofread things.

Or more accurately, I guilted, manipulated, bribed, or trapped them into proofreading things.

Now artificial intelligence does the work while my friends remain available for more important duties, like having lunch with me and pretending my stories are autobiographical.

One more secret before I go.

At night, just before falling asleep, I tell my brain to come up with ideas for future posts.

And strangely enough, it often obeys.

When I wake up, there are usually one or two ideas floating around inside my tiny brain.

I have learned something important, however.

I must write the ideas down before I empty my bladder.

If I tinkle first, the ideas vanish instantly.

I have no scientific explanation for this.

Apparently my creativity and urinary system are connected by some delicate neurological filament.

So during the night I often scribble key words onto paper in the dark like a deranged hostage sending coded messages.

Then the next morning I look at the notes and discover mysterious phrases like:

“Norwegian dentist monkey canoe.”

Which, oddly enough, is still better than some Hollywood pitches I’ve heard.

And naturally, this entire explanation will now become a post.

Complete with a fun image.