--THERE'S SOMETHING IN YOUR EYES

…I’m not kidding when I say that every day someone wants to give me money.  Yesterday there were five people.  Here’s one of them:

Hello,

I am miss Joy Kruger from South Africa and I am contacting you because I need your help in management of some amount that my father left for me before he died.

My father was a very rich cocoa/timber farmer but was poisoned by his business colleagues and they are now after me so i hard to escape my way into a church here in Republic of Benin.

Please indicate if you’re interested in taking me along because my present condition here is critically frustrating.

Am waiting.

Joy

…Yesterday I finished the book, “How To Write” by Richard Rhodes.

Here are some of the bits I liked best:

-“Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning.” Mary Bateson

-“If you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and endeavor to live the life you have imagined, you will meet with success unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau

-“A writer should end every chapter with either a door slammed shut or a door flung open.” Dostoyevsky

-“If you’re an author, it helps to have a high tolerance for rejection.” Sarah Lyall

-“To write is always to seal noted into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”

-“A poem, which must enter the world unaccompanied, arrives fat with verbal orchestration.  A poem gets its comeuppance in turn when it’s stuck on a greeting card, where it looks overweight and overdressed.”

-“No writing is ever wasted; every sentence you write, however awkward and whether you use it or not, is a learning experience.”

-“It’s such an improbable and foolish-sounding thing to say in front of anybody: ‘I’m going to become a writer.” Richard Rhodes