“Time is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.” — Andy Rooney Preserving the past is like herding cats in a wind tunnel—chaotic, noble, and almost always covered in dust. But when I stumbled over a box in the attic labeled “Old Stuff – Maybe Important?”, I didn’t find junk. I found treasure. Faded photographs. Forgotten faces. And one particularly blurry image that looked like Uncle Al photobombing his own wedding. It all started with a love story. Kenneth Victor Smith, a wide-eyed soldier from Los Angeles, stationed in Liverpool at the tail end of WWII, met Peg—a Liverpudlian firecracker…
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Money for Nothing The Misadventures of the Chronically Employed
“That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it Get your money for nothing, get your chicks for free” – Dire Straits, 1985 We’ve all done things for money. Some noble. Some necessary. And some that still wake us up at night in a cold sweat, with the faint echo of elevator music and the itch of polyester uniforms. From the moment we’re tall enough to reach a cash register and can fake a smile that says, “Yes, I’d love to help you find your size in a shoe we haven’t carried since 1983,” we’re ushered into a world of occupational roulette. Sometimes you land on “Valuable Life Experience.” Sometimes…
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Adventures in Shoe Sales The truth about what goes on behind the scenes at Thom McCan's
By the summer of ’69, I was broke. Despite working every conceivable, worthless dead-end job, from counting ball bearings to baking “surprise-filled” doughnuts for the First Baptist Church of Van Nuys, I had absolutely nothing to show for my efforts. I was twenty years old, fresh out of the Navy, and ready to start my college education at Los Angeles Valley College in the fall. I was desperate for any job that would take me. Any job. My best friend Tom was working at a local shoe store called Thom McAn’s. He told me they just had an opening. Would I like to apply? He’d worked there for four years…
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What Makes a Successful Writer? Everything you need to be able to do besides write
The scene opens with the haggard writer hunched over a dilapidated Underwood, struggling to meet his midnight deadline. The air is stale and thick with cigarette smoke and there’s an empty bottle of scotch lying on the floor. By the smell of things, it’s obvious he hasn’t slept, eaten or washed his clothes in over a week. That was the Hollywood image of writers before the information highway arrived in the early 1990s. Since then, the business of writing has changed in more ways than anyone could have possibly imagined in 1939. These days, a writer’s job doesn’t end when they drop their query down the out-bound chute at the…
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15 Questions Your Ghostwriter Should Be Asking You And other tips for finding the right person to write your book
What do a Labrador Retriever, a poor Southern tobacco farmer, and a World War II survivor[1] have in common? If you guessed nothing, you’d be wrong. In fact, each was the basis of a best-selling book. Two of them even went on to become Hollywood box office smashes. The world we live in is a fascinating place, filled with thousands of entertaining stories. Some, like those of World War II survivors, will soon be gone—lost forever. Wouldn’t you like to make sure that your story isn’t? If so, you need to write a book! “Sure,” you say. “It’s easy for you to say. You’ve written books and know how to…
