Man cannot live by baseball alone.

When there is a day off from Red Sox spring training games, culture-starved fans wander around Fort Myers looking for nonsports diversions. In a continuing search for financial security, I always attend the Southwest Florida Reading Festival.

I certainly am not trying to improve my mind. It’s much too late for that. No, I listen carefully to the successful authors to find a spark that will finally get me off my fleshy duff for long enough to write a best-seller, then retire to Sanibel Island, with a waterfront house surrounded by walls high enough to discourage the hardiest freeloading (and frozen) New England visitor.

My favorite author is Tim Dorsey, a certified lunatic who writes hilarious books (“Florida Roadkill,” “Hammerhead Ranch Motel,” etc.) about Serge, a serial killer “who kills only jerks who deserve it.” Dorsey told a Saturday panel that his books are highly popular in prisons, a dubious honor, he admitted. When a Dorsey fan got caught speeding to a book signing, he told the cop he was on the way to see Dorsey. “I love Serge,” the cop said and let the fan off with a warning.

If you have the cops and crooks on your side, you are bound to be successful. Dorsey was asked where he gets his material. “Read the Florida newspapers. You couldn’t ask for more material.”

“If bad stuff happens, it happens in Florida,” agreed panel member James O. Born (“Escape Clause,” “Burn Zone,” etc.). “If we ever wrote a novel about a female astronaut driving across the country in diapers to kidnap a rival, the editors would think we were insane.” Born admits that he writes what he knows, as a former ATF agent, SWAT team member and a robbery task force member in crime-infested Miami.

Born decided to write after a criminal broke loose during an arrest and the officer had to chase him down and tackle him. “Why did you run?” asked the angered cop. The crook answered, “It’s my job to run. It’s your job to catch me.”

“Police work can be very funny,” Born said. After his experience in Florida crime, he dismissed the television show “CSI: Miami” as “horrendous. If that red-headed cop ever spoke to me like that, his head would be a different shape in the morning,” he said. He covets positive comments from fellow officers who call his books highly accurate – and funny.

Author Bob Morris (“Bahamarama,” “Bermuda Schwartz,” etc.) never strays far from prison plots since his hero, Zack Chasteen, is a retired Miami Dolphin strong safety and a reformed jailbird. Morris has a unique plot development style. He visits a gorgeous island, spends a few months and listens to the local gossip. Then he wraps a plot around the details. “The place defines the book. I have no idea what the plot will be until I get there. The story emerges out of the place.”

Not a bad plan, but I left the panel still uninspired.

Next was Stuart Woods, who is so successful that he has had 22 consecutive books on The New York Times best-seller list. He flies his own plane to literary events. I hate him.

Woods (“Chiefs,” “Orchid Beach,” “Beverly Hills Dead,” etc. etc.) offered his seven rules for novel-writing success. The first one was: “Don’t ever write a novel. Save yourself the humiliation when you stop after two chapters and your friends ask to read it.”

Woods, who summers on Mount Desert Island, said he works only an hour a day to write books “that I want to read.” He never has a plot outline and the books are totally improvised. He does as little research as possible because “research is much more fun than writing and it’s very hard to put a stop to it” and finally start writing.

An hour a day? Way too much work.

Of course, no afternoon in Fort Myers can escape baseball completely. Another panel featured Steven Krasner, who has covered the Red Sox for the Providence Journal since 1968 (you remember Bill Buckner). He has penned various baseball books including “The Longest Game” about the longest game in baseball history, a 33-inning epic at McCoy Field featuring (trivia alert) Wade Boggs at third for the Pawtucket Red Sox and Cal Ripkin at third for the Orioles farm club.

He went to the same Rhode Island gas station the day after the Red Sox lost in 2003 to the Yankees, then in 2004 when the Sox came back to win after a 3-0 deficit and certain defeat. “In 2003 they all walked around like zombies, shaking their heads at perfect strangers without saying a word. A year later the same people were laughing, giving high-fives to strangers.”

The 2007 World Series victory was nice and all, “but it wasn’t the same as 2004. Sox fans are not exactly spoiled … but they are well on their way,” Krasner said.

Maybe that’s it. I will write a book about me and the Red Sox. Nah. Too tragic.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.