Hello Reader A couple of years ago I met a therapist at a party. If you haven’t contemplated these things before, it’s generally considered A Good Thing to get more comfortable with your shadow / your clown. But that doesn’t make it easy. It can be hard to imagine letting anyone see it. Here's a snippet from the very end of our Zoom: JPF What was your clown again? I’ve forgotten. THERAPIST You made me be shallow, basically. JPF Oh, yeah, the shallow, small-talking partygoer... THERAPIST I cannot do it! I’d be more comfortable asking somebody about their death instinct within the first three minutes. Yeah, that was the clown you gave me. ​ What’s YOUR clown?(Ha! You think I expect anyone to answer!) --
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📖 7 Books in 16 languages 📚 including: How To Change The World A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
Take a close look at these women, Audrey Heath (standing) and Alice May Spinks. For several years, while the men have been away fighting in the trenches, in France, these two have been running the office in London. Both women started work as secretaries. The war gave them a precious opportunity to do more, but with the war’s end their position became precarious: the economy was unstable, and the men came back. They could have reverted to being secretaries, if the company generated sufficient...
Hello Reader Recently in the zooms about writing a book proposal, I told the story of a woman I worked with who printed a beautiful limited edition booklet of her work in progress. It wasn’t the whole work in progress, just a sample chapter that we agreed was in terrific shape. I don’t remember the exact number of copies she produced. Ten? Twenty? Not many, anyway. Each copy had a beautiful photograph on the front cover - a photo that had been supplied by one of her friends. - Having printed...
Hello Reader Sometimes, the best way to learn something – anything – is to do it all wrong first, on purpose. It’s a bit like a vaccine: having absorbed the wrongness, we become stronger. To show what I mean, I’ve taken some fairly recent nonfiction books that have been hugely successful, and attempted to write bad pitches for them. To be perfectly clear, I invented these bad pitches myself – they’re nothing to do with the real authors of these real bestsellers. Don’t worry if you haven’t...