Today is the day to get down and dirty.

5

Today we'll leave George Foreman to ponder his next move, and travel west to his sister Meredith, who suddenly found herself in the unusual and happy position of having found inspiration.

The funny thing is that Meredith never really wanted to be a writer. She was definitely jealous of George, but not in the way in which he was living out her dream; it was just the he was a jerk and she hated to see jerks get success, especially incredible amounts of success.

The truth was, Meredith and her husband were struggling as it was. With the three children, they were living paycheck to paycheck. Meredith had no intention of wasting her time on something as unreliable as writing. She already resented her husband somewhat for seeking his degree when he could be bringing in more money.

And if there was one thing that Meredith Foreman shared in common with her brother George Foreman, it was that she was stubborn. Although George was one of the wealthiest writers in the country, Meredith would rather gnaw off her left arm than ask her brother for money. So she made do, in a job for which she really didn't have that much passion, in a fairly boring life.

Except one morning, Meredith woke up, early, feeling something different. It wasn't heartburn or arthritis. It wasn't the fear that she had forgotten to pay something or turn something off. It wasn't halitosis and she wasn't horny.

No, it was inspiration.

Not having had much use lately for inspiration, Meredith savored it. She packed her husband and her children off to school and called in sick to the elementary school at which she taught. She sat down at her husband's computer and wrote, all day long, with hardly any breaks. It hardly felt like she was even putting forth any effort. From somewhere, a resource had been tapped.

Meredith, while being intelligent, had never entertained much of a passion for writing, but this was something new. It wasn't the sketchy, almost sickening desperation she had felt when she worked on something that she really cared about. This was as natural as breathing to her. The words poured out of her mind and onto the screen and she knew, without having to even debate it, that she was on to something here.

Meredith worked for days, writing during lunch, writing before bedtime, writing in her head, and after she felt that she was close to completion, she called up her friend Ginger Thompson. Ginger was a housewife who used to be an editor at a fancy publishing house you've probably heard of. Meredith wasted no time telling Ginger about her strange inspiration or her new, odd mindset, but she simply told Ginger about what she was writing.

"Let me make some calls," Ginger said, after a few questions. "This sounds absolutely brilliant."

Of course it does, Meredith thought as she hung up the phone. She couldn't believe that she had found this cocky side to herself.

She smiled to herself. She was acting just like her brother George.

Meredith had never gotten along with George, even before his fame and fortune. They were both pigheaded, which meant that they butted their pigheads often. George's confidence enraged Meredith, and as her anger built, so did his coolness, in the typical "I am rubber" scenario. Her parents always catered to George, not because they favored him, but because they didn't want to be the object of his wrath. She hated to admit it, but she even hated the way he looked. Unattractive. It was safe to say that Meredith only loved her brother in the way that she was legally bound to.

And now she felt like him.

She called George a few days later to remind him about Mother's Day (of course, he wouldn't never be bothered to remember on his own.) She told him about her novel.

George, for maybe the first time since he was in diapers, sounded a bit thrown off.

Meredith was pleased, and kept working.