Adventures at Home and Abroad

I loved Bantry. And Killarney was the jumping off point for some of those tiny roads of your nightmares. But you had to take those roads to see the sea. The view from our hotel outside of Killarney. Sublime. Molly Gallivan’s Visitor Center, on the road to Kenmare. Bantry House 100 year old wisteria…a theme. Dingle Peninsula.

I attended a session at the HNS-2017 conference yesterday morning that taught me a valuable lesson. If you want to sell your book, there are a couple of things you absolutely should not do. The session was actually a Preconference Academy offering, a two-hour block devoted to Dynamic Pacing. It's a skill that's incredibly easy to recognize when you're reading, but often seems impossible to construct and maintain throughout any type of written document, from proposals, to marketing materials, to, yes, novels. The speakers were Irene Goodman, a "super agent" with decades of experience, and Selden Edwards, a novelist who got his book (The Little Book) published after thirty years. He's now working on his third book. I was actually quite interested in his personal story, how he managed to persevere for thirty years. And I was ready to buy his book. Until he opened his mouth, and wouldn't shut it. He seemed to believe that the session was all about him an...