I was not going to read John Lescroart's book Nothing But The Truth because I thought it was about John Kani and television's original Super Bitch, Pamela Nomvete.

I was not going to read John Lescroart's book Nothing But The Truth because I thought it was about John Kani and television's original Super Bitch, Pamela Nomvete.

If you can find it, read the first chapter and tell me if you did not move to the second chapter, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, ... until you finished the book.

The book is a model of how writers should commit pen to paper -beautiful, majestic writing. Gripping.

I'm throwing down the gauntlet - if you can write like Lescroart - and make sense - then here's your space, as long as you say everything you wanted to say in ... 500 words.

Not 499, as the Indian shopkeepers are likely to claim copyright to it; not 501 as Coco Chanel would want to sue. Exactly five-hundred words!

Not a word more, not a word less.

Tell me why Anele Mda should not call Zuma a rapist. Spare a moment and say, in 500 words, why the moral regeneration programme was set back a million years by the antics of the Kangaman, as some in the media are wont to refer to him.

Tell me why Obama, by his mere Kenyan connection to the continent, can make America's foreign policy more amenable to Africa - something the Republicans have not thought about in donkey's years of (mis)rule.

While Obama has told the world "Yes, We Can" against the backdrop of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream", make an argument more propelling than Thabo Mbeki's "I Am An African."

Has anyone, do you think, written anything better than "Blood, Sweat and Tears"?

Make me weep; make me sit up and think. All in 500 words. No Mas.

There's a new book out about xenophobia edited by Wits academic Tawana Kupe and two of his peers. Read the introduction. God, I wish I had written it myself.

It is magical, word for word.

There's a loudmouth in the book who contributes a chapter too - Andile Mngxitama. In his take, We Are Not Like That, he writes evocatively about how darkies do not want to be seen to be kaffirs.

It is beautiful, sensible writing.

I have a xeroxed copy at my work station of a piece by Jeff Powell on how "football went home early on Sunday" because it had Sven Goran Eriksson at the helm.

"The most disgracefully unprepared team in England's World Cup history was managed by a money-grabbing charlatan and captained by a narcissist so obsessed with himself that when the inevitable humiliation came, he cried for himself, not his country."

Write for me like Esquire magazine would a story on Frank Sinatra or Robert De Niro.

If bullets are fired, make me smell the cordite even when I was not there to witness it myself.

Make your point; make sense. In 500 words. Not a word more; not a word less.

If you can do that, this is your space. Guaranteed. Whoever you are.

PS - Count the words in this column.