I have a few who inspired my writing vision, starting with the rock critics of the '70s in rock mags like Hit Parader, Creem, PRM, Crawdaddy, Circus, Stereo Review, et al. The rock literati included, then, current Substackers, Wayne Robins https://waynerobins49.substack.com/ and Robert Christgau https://robertchristgau.substack.com/.
Patti Smith (a current 'Stacker) was also influential, as she was a rock scribe and poet before she signed with Arista in '75 as a recording artist. I was also influenced by the writing of Barry Hansen aka Dr. Demento. Barry was employed by Warner Bros. Records in the early '70s as a PR scribe, writing liner notes for the label's "two-fer" loss leader 2-LP, $2 sampler albums one could get thru the mail.
He also wrote copy (hilariously and irreverently, at times....my 2 favorite writing traits!) for the label's weekly, in-house, promo-only, 8-page promo piece, "Circular," available only to radio personnel and record industry types.
Another funny, irreverent, and sometimes caustic writer of influence was the great Fran Lebowitz, whose books (instead of the high school "necessary" assigned books), I'd read voraciously! Her wit and observational humor can be summarized in her, "Your right to wear a lime green leisure suit ends where it meets my eye." Maybe not now with that line, but, she was relevant back in that day!😎😁
Love your choices! Never heard of most of them! But, yes, Fran Lebowitz! How could I forget her! Her humor is full-on NYC snobbery while my feeble attempts were always Midwestern yokel but I've never laughed out loud as much as I do when I've read Fran. (I've used up my quota of exclamations so I'll quit now.)
Thanks, Ramona! Looking back, an upper-middle-class, suburban Protestant lad from Houston shouldn't be as attracted as I was to her (and others) and her liberal, Jewish, NYC POV, but maybe it WAS those differences I found so infinitely fascinating!
Maybe it was those differences. It puts a whole new light on our perceptions of the Big Apple and the literary scene there. At her TV appearances, until it was verboten, she always had a cigarette in her hand. And she's still here!
And, I'm backwards on that.....maybe I've seen something on TV a time or two where she's in front of an auditorium, but I know I dug her writing! It may be because that's how I discovered her!
It hit me just the opposite--once I saw her and heard her I could 'listen' to her as I read her essays. Have you seen 'Pretend It's a City' on Netflix? It's Fran in conversation with Martin Scorsese. I really, really hate cities but I loved that convo!
I was most inspired by Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables. Yes, I’m Canadian 😄. She highlighted the importance of writing about what you know.
I was very young. I started writing short stories and poetry in Grade 3. I wrote a lot as a child and as a teenager, but I let it slip away from me as an adult. Your question has prompted me to think about re-reading the Anne books. As you know, I am thinking about moving away from my entertainment newsletter and starting something else. L.M. Montgomery’s writing is the flavor I am looking for, so I will go back to my roots for inspiration. Thank you for the prompt, Ramona!
You bet! It's exciting and a little scary to go on a new writing path but maybe the Anne books are just what you need. You've given me the notion to go back and read them again, too. I really did love them.
My writing inspirations are Dorothy Dunnett for breathless brilliance, Bernard Cornwall for a similar breadth, Rosamunde Pilcher for warming of the soul and being a master of 'setting', LM Montgomery for shimmering scene setting and 'real' characterisation. Matthew Harffy for showing protagonists can be brutal but also possess soul and intellect.
There are so many who inspire as I write. But none that give me a message for life. I don't read for that, I read to be carried away on the wings of a good fictional story. I write for the same reason.
I don't know DD or MH, but I've read and loved Rosamunde Pilcher. I love any writer who can take me away enough to forget about editing as I'm reading. Nothing better than being totally immersed in a story without thinking about the placement of the words or what I would have done differently--it's a plague sometimes, and totally ego-driven.
So happy to see this topic, Ramona and thanks for the shoutout! I’ve been thinking about this since our exchange.
I always wanted to be a writer but the first book to inspire me was reading Catch-22 when I was 15. I didn’t know writing could be so bonkers and hilarious and serious all at the same time. It felt more like real life than anything I’d ever read.
The second was in college, reading a writer another person mentioned in these comments--David Foster Wallace. Not his novels but his essays for Harpers Magazine. He was clearly just reporting exactly what he saw, but it was all at the same time poignant and funny and absurd. He seemed to be getting at the truth somehow, and I wanted to do the same.
Yes! Catch-22 earns a place all by itself. That's the kind of fearless writing I can only dream about doing. I've tried and it's just not in me to be able to carry it off. Kurt Vonnegut writes like that, too. It sounds like DFW does that same thing. We just borrow words; they OWN them.
so many writers have inspired me in different ways, but the one writer who's book actually left me wanting to tell my own stories (half as well, if i'm lucky) was beryl markham's west with the night. it also inspired me to take flying lessons and see the world...
i did take flying lessons :-) and i was aways curious about seeing the world (i was an anthropology/archaeology student), but i suppose i developed a different way of framing my experiences. i've seen some of the world, but there's a lot more out there!
I was absolutely enthralled as a little girl ( mid years: around 11-12) with CharlesDickens. His strange, eccentric, colorful characters were completely absorbing to a kid with way too much imagination. My favorite was Oliver Twist_now those were characters, who can resist them! But I read every Charles Dickens boom I could get my hands pn: Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield etc. loved every one and they inspired me to write!
I loved Oliver Twist but couldn't get into the others. Maybe it was the timing. I didn't try until I got older, and it just wasn't there for me. I still have an old edition of The Old Curiosity Shop. Maybe I'll give it a try again. I love that his stories were serialized in newspapers. Can you imagine any paper doing that now?
I'm nowhere near as well-read as I'd like to be, but the author who inspired me to start writing my own fiction was Carl Hiassen. I read a number of his classics (e.g., Skin Tight, Stormy Weather) in my twenties and learned that there are no constraints when it comes to plot, humor, character, etc. That's the Florida influence - anything is possible. As an adult I've read almost the entire John le Carre catalogue. I quickly disabused myself of "writing like him," but I love his plot construction and how he leaves little breadcrumbs along the way to an always explosive finale.
Elmore Leonard was a huge Carl Hiassen fan, which is why I read him, too. He can write about the most gruesome stuff and make me laugh out loud. That's a feat! And he does make you keep turning pages--even when your stomach is turning!
I knew him when I was living and working in Detroit. We often traveled in the same writing circles, and I interviewed him once for my newspaper column. He was a writer's writer who never put on airs or pretended he knew more than anyone else, yet we all learned a lot by listening to him--and reading him.
His two most famous bits of writing advice: 'Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.' and 'I try to leave out the parts readers skip.'
My reading and writing journey is so much different and possibly strange(?) compared to everyone else here, haha.
I gobbled down books like an unsupervised kid eating Halloween candy... as a kid. I remember being about 6 to 11-ish and truly attempting to read 3 books at once on top of any reading we had to do for class.
Everything was fiction, some based off happenings like the Holocaust (Behind the Bedroom Wall and Number the Stars were favorites) but most were slice-of-life books I loved reading.
The most outlandish I’d read and loved were Goosebumps and pretty much anything with anthropomorphic animals.
I REALLY had a thing for anthropomorphic animals, I realized, when I thought back to what I was reading when it wasn’t slice-of-life, finding lots of old stories and (sometimes accompanying) art of anthropomorphic animals, aaaaand seeing myself now as someone who still reads and watched anthropomorphic animals (there’s a manga called BEASTARS that I looove!)! Haha
Anyway, I also just remember having an aversion to any book that had a male narrator growing up. I guess I instantly became disinterested cause I felt I couldn’t vicariously live or engulf myself in a man’s POV or story period? Not sure.
I don’t think being any of it ever really connected for me (a writer inspiring me to write). The older I got, the less I had time for leisure reading, ironically because I was in honors English classes most of my school career and we’d read 3+ mandatory books during the summer as well and had to annotate them and write essays for them.
There was this one time (and I’m getting a tattoo of this) in honors English where we were reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and there was a line that hit me SO hard and I never ever forgot it:
“The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”
Around that mid to late high school time, I knew I was “rebellious.” I wanted a lot in life that family didn’t agree with or support and I related so so much with Edna.
Separately, entirely, I’d write poetry, my own personal anecdotes and motivational words in Facebook statuses, angsty diary entries and poems on Tumblr back when it was popular, and haikus on Instagram.
And SO many personal blogs over the years!
I had teachers, professors, friends, family, and sometimes strangers praise my writing and my voice and style.
It always came through like a downloaded channel for me and would just spill out of my fingers. I even got a poem that came to me in the shower (of course) published in our little high school publication.
But... I never believed I could make anything of it. Or truly BE a writer that got paid to write about my life or whatnot.
Even after seeing and reading memoirs and personal essays. I felt a LITTLE more like it was possible, but I ultimately fell into a trap where I believed my writing didn’t have enough value to become anything that could ever sustain me.
I slipped into trying to create an online business and ended up regurgitating marketing and business stuff so much that I lost my writing voice and it SCARED me.
Got it back with a Writing the Layers workshop. Literally brought me back to life I was so so sad I felt clogged as a writer or like Ariel did when she lost her voice in Little Mermaid.
And since college, I’ve been caregiving for my mom and trying to make online business work AND, I’ve been hired to write articles as a freelancer before, I’ve been hired on as a writer and associate editor in the past... writing articles I was praised for by the EIC and were the site’s most popular... but I still struggled to believe in myself to write what I really really enjoyed (personal essays and writings).
Super recently though I just got tired of trying to force myself to fit in molds I didn’t belong in, even if I don’t have support from family.
So I made my substack newsletter and am off writing exactly how I wanna write and want to continue to improve and hone my craft as a writer!
Wow, I'm glad I wrote this piece just to be able to read your comment! Thank you!
My anthropomorphic experiences were more along the lines of 'Bambi' and Beatrix Potter, but I can relate to not wanting to read anything with a male (boy) protagonist. When I think back on my early reading they weren't included. I wanted to read about girls. Stong, smart, funny girls who I knew would grow into strong, smart, funny women. I grew up in the 40s and 50s--the worst times for budding womanhood--but it's surprising how many books there were out there like that for me.
Thank YOU for writing your newsletter and having this Q&A!
That may be why I gravitated toward girl narrators and focused books! I wanted to see myself in them, or how they dealt with issues or just feel like I could relate to them.
And it seems like writing was one of the only ways to rebel as women from society’s standards unfortunately.
I know my mom, who’s 60, said she wanted to do things like wood shop but wasn’t allowed. So upsetting!
I was an avid reader as a child, and I loved to write, but I didn't feel inspired as an actual writer until I was an adult. First, while I am not a horror fan or avid Stephen King fan, I loved his book On Writing (I should probably read it again). Second, I fell in love with Jon Krakauer's research driven writing style. Third, Rachel Held Evans was a beautiful writer who showed me now to honestly write about my faith.
I was never a Stephen King fan so when my sister-in-law (a huge SK fan) sent me 'On Writing' as a birthday gift I was not thrilled--until I read it. It's at the top of my list of best writing books now, and I need to read it again!
I agree about Jon Krakauer, and I would add John McPhee to that list of writers who do such meticulous research and then mold into a work so readable you can't put it down. As well as Carl Sagan.
I didn't know anything about Rachel Held Evans, though I'd heard her name. What a tragedy that she died so young, but she left a lasting legacy.
I've assigned it to high school students as extra credit reading. I just think On Writing is one of the best written and most practical books about writing I've ever been given.
None, I don't read! My writing is inspired by my own personal experiences in life! One of the reasons I do not read is because I don't want my writing to be influenced by others.
Come back when you've actually written something in your newsletter and we'll talk. I have a hard time believing any writer can get by without reading as inspiration, so until I've seen what you've written without that tool, I'll hold my judgement.
Challenge accepted! I'm technologically deficient. However, I'll figure out this newsletter and post something for your reading enjoyment. I do take requests from any genre from poetry to fiction! Ask and you shall receive
😂 never would I hope to change your mind. However I'm a published author and have won several international competitions. I'm quite happy indeed, again hope you enjoy reading my work
For me, it was David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System.
I've never read any DFW. I should fix that.
I have a few who inspired my writing vision, starting with the rock critics of the '70s in rock mags like Hit Parader, Creem, PRM, Crawdaddy, Circus, Stereo Review, et al. The rock literati included, then, current Substackers, Wayne Robins https://waynerobins49.substack.com/ and Robert Christgau https://robertchristgau.substack.com/.
Patti Smith (a current 'Stacker) was also influential, as she was a rock scribe and poet before she signed with Arista in '75 as a recording artist. I was also influenced by the writing of Barry Hansen aka Dr. Demento. Barry was employed by Warner Bros. Records in the early '70s as a PR scribe, writing liner notes for the label's "two-fer" loss leader 2-LP, $2 sampler albums one could get thru the mail.
He also wrote copy (hilariously and irreverently, at times....my 2 favorite writing traits!) for the label's weekly, in-house, promo-only, 8-page promo piece, "Circular," available only to radio personnel and record industry types.
Another funny, irreverent, and sometimes caustic writer of influence was the great Fran Lebowitz, whose books (instead of the high school "necessary" assigned books), I'd read voraciously! Her wit and observational humor can be summarized in her, "Your right to wear a lime green leisure suit ends where it meets my eye." Maybe not now with that line, but, she was relevant back in that day!😎😁
Love your choices! Never heard of most of them! But, yes, Fran Lebowitz! How could I forget her! Her humor is full-on NYC snobbery while my feeble attempts were always Midwestern yokel but I've never laughed out loud as much as I do when I've read Fran. (I've used up my quota of exclamations so I'll quit now.)
Thanks, Ramona! Looking back, an upper-middle-class, suburban Protestant lad from Houston shouldn't be as attracted as I was to her (and others) and her liberal, Jewish, NYC POV, but maybe it WAS those differences I found so infinitely fascinating!
Maybe it was those differences. It puts a whole new light on our perceptions of the Big Apple and the literary scene there. At her TV appearances, until it was verboten, she always had a cigarette in her hand. And she's still here!
I love hearing Fran talk and then her essays were so disappointing in comparison. Maybe I should have read the essays first!
And, I'm backwards on that.....maybe I've seen something on TV a time or two where she's in front of an auditorium, but I know I dug her writing! It may be because that's how I discovered her!
It hit me just the opposite--once I saw her and heard her I could 'listen' to her as I read her essays. Have you seen 'Pretend It's a City' on Netflix? It's Fran in conversation with Martin Scorsese. I really, really hate cities but I loved that convo!
I was most inspired by Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables. Yes, I’m Canadian 😄. She highlighted the importance of writing about what you know.
Yes, I can see that. Do you remember how old you were, and at what stage of your writing?
I was very young. I started writing short stories and poetry in Grade 3. I wrote a lot as a child and as a teenager, but I let it slip away from me as an adult. Your question has prompted me to think about re-reading the Anne books. As you know, I am thinking about moving away from my entertainment newsletter and starting something else. L.M. Montgomery’s writing is the flavor I am looking for, so I will go back to my roots for inspiration. Thank you for the prompt, Ramona!
You bet! It's exciting and a little scary to go on a new writing path but maybe the Anne books are just what you need. You've given me the notion to go back and read them again, too. I really did love them.
My writing inspirations are Dorothy Dunnett for breathless brilliance, Bernard Cornwall for a similar breadth, Rosamunde Pilcher for warming of the soul and being a master of 'setting', LM Montgomery for shimmering scene setting and 'real' characterisation. Matthew Harffy for showing protagonists can be brutal but also possess soul and intellect.
There are so many who inspire as I write. But none that give me a message for life. I don't read for that, I read to be carried away on the wings of a good fictional story. I write for the same reason.
I don't know DD or MH, but I've read and loved Rosamunde Pilcher. I love any writer who can take me away enough to forget about editing as I'm reading. Nothing better than being totally immersed in a story without thinking about the placement of the words or what I would have done differently--it's a plague sometimes, and totally ego-driven.
So happy to see this topic, Ramona and thanks for the shoutout! I’ve been thinking about this since our exchange.
I always wanted to be a writer but the first book to inspire me was reading Catch-22 when I was 15. I didn’t know writing could be so bonkers and hilarious and serious all at the same time. It felt more like real life than anything I’d ever read.
The second was in college, reading a writer another person mentioned in these comments--David Foster Wallace. Not his novels but his essays for Harpers Magazine. He was clearly just reporting exactly what he saw, but it was all at the same time poignant and funny and absurd. He seemed to be getting at the truth somehow, and I wanted to do the same.
Yes! Catch-22 earns a place all by itself. That's the kind of fearless writing I can only dream about doing. I've tried and it's just not in me to be able to carry it off. Kurt Vonnegut writes like that, too. It sounds like DFW does that same thing. We just borrow words; they OWN them.
Totally agree on Catch-22. I read it in my early twenties and it was the first time I truly realized a book could do something no other medium could.
so many writers have inspired me in different ways, but the one writer who's book actually left me wanting to tell my own stories (half as well, if i'm lucky) was beryl markham's west with the night. it also inspired me to take flying lessons and see the world...
I've known other writers who loved West With the Night--without wanting to be pilots. So did you take flying lessons? Did you see the world?
i did take flying lessons :-) and i was aways curious about seeing the world (i was an anthropology/archaeology student), but i suppose i developed a different way of framing my experiences. i've seen some of the world, but there's a lot more out there!
I was absolutely enthralled as a little girl ( mid years: around 11-12) with CharlesDickens. His strange, eccentric, colorful characters were completely absorbing to a kid with way too much imagination. My favorite was Oliver Twist_now those were characters, who can resist them! But I read every Charles Dickens boom I could get my hands pn: Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield etc. loved every one and they inspired me to write!
I loved Oliver Twist but couldn't get into the others. Maybe it was the timing. I didn't try until I got older, and it just wasn't there for me. I still have an old edition of The Old Curiosity Shop. Maybe I'll give it a try again. I love that his stories were serialized in newspapers. Can you imagine any paper doing that now?
I'm nowhere near as well-read as I'd like to be, but the author who inspired me to start writing my own fiction was Carl Hiassen. I read a number of his classics (e.g., Skin Tight, Stormy Weather) in my twenties and learned that there are no constraints when it comes to plot, humor, character, etc. That's the Florida influence - anything is possible. As an adult I've read almost the entire John le Carre catalogue. I quickly disabused myself of "writing like him," but I love his plot construction and how he leaves little breadcrumbs along the way to an always explosive finale.
Elmore Leonard was a huge Carl Hiassen fan, which is why I read him, too. He can write about the most gruesome stuff and make me laugh out loud. That's a feat! And he does make you keep turning pages--even when your stomach is turning!
Leonard is a glaring omission for me. Need to rectify that!
I knew him when I was living and working in Detroit. We often traveled in the same writing circles, and I interviewed him once for my newspaper column. He was a writer's writer who never put on airs or pretended he knew more than anyone else, yet we all learned a lot by listening to him--and reading him.
His two most famous bits of writing advice: 'Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.' and 'I try to leave out the parts readers skip.'
My reading and writing journey is so much different and possibly strange(?) compared to everyone else here, haha.
I gobbled down books like an unsupervised kid eating Halloween candy... as a kid. I remember being about 6 to 11-ish and truly attempting to read 3 books at once on top of any reading we had to do for class.
Everything was fiction, some based off happenings like the Holocaust (Behind the Bedroom Wall and Number the Stars were favorites) but most were slice-of-life books I loved reading.
The most outlandish I’d read and loved were Goosebumps and pretty much anything with anthropomorphic animals.
I REALLY had a thing for anthropomorphic animals, I realized, when I thought back to what I was reading when it wasn’t slice-of-life, finding lots of old stories and (sometimes accompanying) art of anthropomorphic animals, aaaaand seeing myself now as someone who still reads and watched anthropomorphic animals (there’s a manga called BEASTARS that I looove!)! Haha
Anyway, I also just remember having an aversion to any book that had a male narrator growing up. I guess I instantly became disinterested cause I felt I couldn’t vicariously live or engulf myself in a man’s POV or story period? Not sure.
I don’t think being any of it ever really connected for me (a writer inspiring me to write). The older I got, the less I had time for leisure reading, ironically because I was in honors English classes most of my school career and we’d read 3+ mandatory books during the summer as well and had to annotate them and write essays for them.
There was this one time (and I’m getting a tattoo of this) in honors English where we were reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin, and there was a line that hit me SO hard and I never ever forgot it:
“The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”
Around that mid to late high school time, I knew I was “rebellious.” I wanted a lot in life that family didn’t agree with or support and I related so so much with Edna.
Separately, entirely, I’d write poetry, my own personal anecdotes and motivational words in Facebook statuses, angsty diary entries and poems on Tumblr back when it was popular, and haikus on Instagram.
And SO many personal blogs over the years!
I had teachers, professors, friends, family, and sometimes strangers praise my writing and my voice and style.
It always came through like a downloaded channel for me and would just spill out of my fingers. I even got a poem that came to me in the shower (of course) published in our little high school publication.
But... I never believed I could make anything of it. Or truly BE a writer that got paid to write about my life or whatnot.
Even after seeing and reading memoirs and personal essays. I felt a LITTLE more like it was possible, but I ultimately fell into a trap where I believed my writing didn’t have enough value to become anything that could ever sustain me.
I slipped into trying to create an online business and ended up regurgitating marketing and business stuff so much that I lost my writing voice and it SCARED me.
Got it back with a Writing the Layers workshop. Literally brought me back to life I was so so sad I felt clogged as a writer or like Ariel did when she lost her voice in Little Mermaid.
And since college, I’ve been caregiving for my mom and trying to make online business work AND, I’ve been hired to write articles as a freelancer before, I’ve been hired on as a writer and associate editor in the past... writing articles I was praised for by the EIC and were the site’s most popular... but I still struggled to believe in myself to write what I really really enjoyed (personal essays and writings).
Super recently though I just got tired of trying to force myself to fit in molds I didn’t belong in, even if I don’t have support from family.
So I made my substack newsletter and am off writing exactly how I wanna write and want to continue to improve and hone my craft as a writer!
Wow, I'm glad I wrote this piece just to be able to read your comment! Thank you!
My anthropomorphic experiences were more along the lines of 'Bambi' and Beatrix Potter, but I can relate to not wanting to read anything with a male (boy) protagonist. When I think back on my early reading they weren't included. I wanted to read about girls. Stong, smart, funny girls who I knew would grow into strong, smart, funny women. I grew up in the 40s and 50s--the worst times for budding womanhood--but it's surprising how many books there were out there like that for me.
Thank YOU for writing your newsletter and having this Q&A!
That may be why I gravitated toward girl narrators and focused books! I wanted to see myself in them, or how they dealt with issues or just feel like I could relate to them.
And it seems like writing was one of the only ways to rebel as women from society’s standards unfortunately.
I know my mom, who’s 60, said she wanted to do things like wood shop but wasn’t allowed. So upsetting!
I was an avid reader as a child, and I loved to write, but I didn't feel inspired as an actual writer until I was an adult. First, while I am not a horror fan or avid Stephen King fan, I loved his book On Writing (I should probably read it again). Second, I fell in love with Jon Krakauer's research driven writing style. Third, Rachel Held Evans was a beautiful writer who showed me now to honestly write about my faith.
I was never a Stephen King fan so when my sister-in-law (a huge SK fan) sent me 'On Writing' as a birthday gift I was not thrilled--until I read it. It's at the top of my list of best writing books now, and I need to read it again!
I agree about Jon Krakauer, and I would add John McPhee to that list of writers who do such meticulous research and then mold into a work so readable you can't put it down. As well as Carl Sagan.
I didn't know anything about Rachel Held Evans, though I'd heard her name. What a tragedy that she died so young, but she left a lasting legacy.
I've assigned it to high school students as extra credit reading. I just think On Writing is one of the best written and most practical books about writing I've ever been given.
I agree. And I've read so many...
None, I don't read! My writing is inspired by my own personal experiences in life! One of the reasons I do not read is because I don't want my writing to be influenced by others.
Come back when you've actually written something in your newsletter and we'll talk. I have a hard time believing any writer can get by without reading as inspiration, so until I've seen what you've written without that tool, I'll hold my judgement.
Challenge accepted! I'm technologically deficient. However, I'll figure out this newsletter and post something for your reading enjoyment. I do take requests from any genre from poetry to fiction! Ask and you shall receive
Ok, I now have 2 posts on my news letter, one called unfinished business and the other All we have is faith! I hope you enjoy!
If you're happy with what you've written it's hard to ask for anything more.
You haven't changed my mind. Writers look for inspiration by observing the world and learn their craft by reading and analyzing and doing.
It is ever so. ☺️
😂 never would I hope to change your mind. However I'm a published author and have won several international competitions. I'm quite happy indeed, again hope you enjoy reading my work