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author
Choose niceness.
Rejections ache. Book rejections have their own trauma, and yet they're a chance for growth. In the 40 years it took me to get my non-fiction book, The Age of Daredevils, published, I learned about my weaknesses and how to take a punch.
What would change if we spent as much time glorifying start lines as we do finish lines? What if we cheered as wildly for people the moment they assumed their position in the starting blocks as we do when they run through the tape at the end of the race?
In 1646, Sir Thomas Browne wanted to rid the world of a vast range of false beliefs -- that elephants have no knees, that beavers bite off their testicles to avoid capture, that garlic disempowers magnets, and so on and on. Browne's problem was that he had no simple way of describing what he was doing.
Cendrine never knew she wanted to be a photographer. She had always planned to be a teacher. And she did. She taught French for 13 years, then started teaching social media, too. In fact, she is the author of two social media books. How does a teacher even find photography?
Jennifer Hayward is Harlequin's newest author. Her new novel, The Divorce Party, was just released as an eBook and will hit stores in paperback later this month. I decided to ask Jen out for lunch.
Criticism is very subjective. My first editor told me, "I don't care for your writing style. Too personal." A decade later that personal style landed me a publisher's contract for my autobiography, Father's Touch. My advice when seeking out critical opinion is not to sell yourself short -- aim high, not low.
This week I had the imperfect pleasure of reading the final work of an author who admired Orwell and who died at age 62 under comparable circumstance. The imperfection of the pleasure with which I greeted the arrival to my mailbox of a new Christopher Hitchens book was a matter of subtraction, a momentary joy diminished by the awareness I'd never experience it again.
