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  • A Writing Life You Can Actually Live

    A Writing Life You Can Actually Live
    2026/10/13
    I believe in writing every day. Sometimes that means a hundred words. Sometimes 2500. Did you hear me say good or great words? No, I didn’t say that. Today, let’s talk about the actual writing life we should achieve.A Writing Life You Can Actually LiveThree proposals, a Vermont retreat, and figuring out the writer I want to become.Before I get started, this week’s download, the writing goals calculator, is available in my resource shop for free. Get the link at Substack or my website. I just turned in three book proposals. One new idea. Two reimagined, tires kicked, engines inspected.And absolutely no pages of an actual story.I need my agents buy-in and I don’t know those people yet. We’re still being introduced. I’ve just stocked piled articles in Newspapers.com, Wikipedia and YouTube Rabbit holes, and the occasional ancient tome on my shelves.But in Vermont—the writers who shared that retreat with me—gave me space to think about what I want my writing life to look like over the next three years. The answer kept coming back to multigenerational stories that tie our present to a vibrant, often hidden past. I want to focus on sisterhoods carrying love, ambition, secrets, and unfinished business across time.Apparently, even after all these 31 books, I’m still asking: Who do I want to be when my writing life grows up?Truthfully, that’s a question that all of us need to ask and keep asking. Heck, it’s the secret to staying young.Everyone’s trying to figure themselves out. Writers do it on the page and in front of an audience.As we figure ourselves out, we ask:What do we want to do?Whom do we want to become?All while balancing the real world: Those other occupations that pay bills. And what about our relationships? Do we have them? Are we keeping them: Family, friendships, peers, romantic and platonic coexistence—all of this makes up our complicated and gloriously messy thing called our lives.Did I mention the money? Most of us need it—unless we’re nepo babies, but sometimes that gift doesn’t work out. We all do need the money.But I digress.I’m not a writer who can sit still. You may have figured that out already. Yet every time I commit to a book idea, I need it to do more than sound interesting. It has to stir something inside me. It has to give me a reason to say: Yes. These are the people, the questions, the history I want to spend the next year or two researching, writing, revising, promoting, and talking about.A proposal can be a few pages. The commitment behind it is considerably larger.As authors, we spend a lot of time worrying about our brands. Some of us are still trying to figure out what that word means when applied to a human being who occasionally writes in pajamas and tiaras.My slightly Type A personality has helped me think about the direction of my work from the beginning. I knew I wanted to tell historical stories. My first avenue was Christian fiction. Then came Regency romances. My work expanded into historical fiction that brings the Caribbean diaspora into view—a history my very Southern American education too often skipped or downplayed. Or obliterated—thanks to United Daughters of Confederacy.What I like to write or read changes as my curiosity grows. Each book has helped me see more clearly what I want to explore in the next.Vermont gave me time to listen to that curiosity without immediately demanding a word count from it.Which brings me to this week’s lesson: Get comfortable in your own writing skin.It’s tempting to want to be the writer who sits down and produces a 80,000-word book in three or four weeks. Sounds enviable, but often we miss the preparation that it took to get there. Some writers I know who work at the speed of light have already spent months deeply studying their subject, developing their characters, and figuring out the story—before sitting and writing.We as voyeurs see the words arriving. We miss the months of work that made it possible.My friends call me a fast writer. We’ll sort of. I can produce a lot of words when I’m sufficiently caffeinated, the research is done, the characters are clear, and I know where the story needs to go.There have also been times when my Type A personality took the wheel and I checked myself into a hotel with room service to crank out ten or twenty thousand words in a day.That habit can get expensive in more ways than hotel bills.Sleep deprivation. Health. Family time. Isolation. Everything leaning out of alignment with that elusive word: balance.Even if I can do this pace, I must consider what it costs me.This week’s writing tool is the word-count chart. Download it. Keep it displayed. It shows how steady effort adds up and gives you a realistic sense of how long a draft might take at your current, realistic pace.A hundred words a day.A thousand words a week. Whatever fits the life you actually have—these numbers help you make a commitment and understand how long it will take ...
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    14 分
  • Finding the Idea You Have to Write

    Finding the Idea You Have to Write
    2026/10/06
    For me, the most hectic—and refreshing—moment is when one book is finished and turned in. My mind doesn’t like to be idle, so I find things to do. I read. I explore. I bake. And eventually, I reach that moment when my brain says, “The heck with this. Let’s write. The question becomes, what do I write.”This week’s tool: Idea Assessment: Finding the Idea You Have to WriteGetting started is one of the hardest things a writer has to do.Where do you begin when you want to write the next great American novel? My first piece of advice is simple: take your expectations down.That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream big. Dream as big as you want. But no great novel can come from you if you aren’t committed to writing the novel in the first place.Writing is one of those endeavors where best intentions, wishes, and all the things you would’ve, should’ve, could’ve written don’t count for much. At some point, you have to show up and put words on paper. That’s how you win the game—or, more accurately, how you put yourself in the game.Before there are chapters, however, there is an idea.And an idea doesn’t have to arrive fully formed.Where Story Ideas Come FromFor me, book ideas tend to come in three ways: a person, a circumstance, or a fascination that won’t let me go.Because I write historical fiction, I may happen upon an unusual fact or discover a person in history who immediately piques my interest. Something about that person catches hold of me, and I need to know more.That happened with Queen of Exiles. While researching and writing Sister Mother Warrior, I encountered the story of Marie-Louise Coidavid Christophe, wife of Henri Christophe. Christophe rose as a soldier in the Haitian Revolution to the liberator Dessalines’s right hand man and then became the king of Haiti, which made Marie-Louise its queen. But what fascinated me was how this simple hotelier’s daughter grew to handle herself on the world stage through building a kingdom in Haiti, then in exile arriving to Europe.I wanted to know her.Who was this woman? What happened to her? What did she experience? How did someone live through such extraordinary transformations?That curiosity became a story.Sometimes, though, it isn’t a person. It’s a circumstance.My Lady Worthing Mysteries grew partly from my fascination with the complicated political and social world surrounding abolition, race, class, and freedom in Regency England. But another piece came from something much more personal: watching Murder, She Wrote with my mother. Those seemingly unrelated things could live together in my imagination—an amateur sleuth stumbling across murders and a historical world filled with political intrigue—catnip.Thus a circumstance became a playground for story.And sometimes an idea begins with nothing more complicated than something you can’t stop thinking about.A question. An image. An experience. Something strange you read. Something that happened to you. Something you wish had happened. Something that makes you angry, delighted, curious, or confused.Pay attention to the thoughts that keep coming back.They may be trying to tell you something.The StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment: Start With the BubbleThis is why I created the StoryMetric™ Idea Assessment process. That’s a lot of fancy words for the way. Vanessa’s brain works and how she teaches story craft.As an engineer, I love spreadsheets and forms. But I love love, magical forms that help build to something. So I built a bubble form where I throw ideas into them, play with those ideas, question them, and gradually refine them until I find the story I know I have to tell.At the beginning, I don’t want perfection. I want possibility.The Idea Bubble is deliberately simple. Give yourself ten minutes and fill the bubbles. One way to get moving is to use a basic story pattern:Subject + Verb + Object + ConflictA girl wants to become an astronaut, but she’s afraid of heights.Is that your novel? Maybe. Maybe not.That’s not the point.The point is that you’ve made something where nothing existed before.Fill another bubble. And another.Don’t edit yourself, not yet. Don’t decide whether an idea is literary enough, commercial enough, original enough, or important enough. Generate first. Assessment comes later.Then take the ideas that create a spark and begin asking questions.What is the situation or circumstance?What fascinates me about it?What question keeps returning?What connection do I have to this idea—something I’ve lived, witnessed, inherited, studied, or wondered about?Now we’re moving from having an idea to discovering whether there might be a story inside it.Give Yourself Permission to Want What You WantThe next question is one writers sometimes don’t want to answer:Why do I want to write this?Maybe you’ve never heard of this subject before and you’re fascinated.Maybe you want to explore something you don’t understand.Maybe there’s ...
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    19 分
  • Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?

    Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?
    2026/09/29
    Three names: Crystal Mason. E.L.A. Chanel Miller.Their stories are different, but each bore the brunt of injustice while others—the folks society deemed worthy of protecting—well, their futures were too promising to ruin. So they were given grace.Until the outcry became too loud to ignore.How loud can you scream?Who Gets the Book Thrown at Them?The last seven days have had my mind spinning.On September 24, Crystal Mason was finally able to breathe.You see, in 2018, Mason was convicted of illegal voting in Texas and sentenced to five years in prison after she cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election. At the time, she was still on federal supervised release for an earlier tax-fraud conviction, and she did not know being on supervised release made her ineligible to vote.Her provisional ballot was never counted, but the law came for her anyway.Think about that for a moment. A ballot that never counted. A woman who said she did not know she was ineligible. Well, that situation gave her a five-year prison sentence.After years of appeals, in March 2024, the Texas Second Court of Appeals reversed Mason’s conviction and entered a judgment of acquittal. The court found the evidence insufficient to prove that she actually knew she was ineligible to vote.But prosecutors didn’t want to take the L. They continued to try to revive the conviction.But in the last seven days, on September 24, 2026, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the state’s highest criminal court—rejected these efforts and left Mason’s acquittal in place.Eight years after her conviction for casting a ballot, she’s finally free of the charges. I guess justice delayed is better than denied, right?Then on September 25, another court confronted the disturbing use of government power. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher found the federal government in contempt after immigration authorities deported a young asylum seeker identified as E.L.A. to El Salvador despite court orders to protect him here.E.L.A., the young minor identified in the papers, had come to the United States as an unaccompanied minor at sixteen. The government wrongly deported him, acknowledged the error and facilitated his return to the United States. Then it deported him again.Judge Gallagher has now ordered the government to facilitate his return. One wonders what will happen, to a teen imigrant who came here seeking a better life.So, you’re asking yourself, Vanessa, what do these two events mean?At first glance, perhaps nothing more than two court rulings happening within twenty-four hours of each other.But I can’t unsee who gets swept into the mashing jaws of American justice—and gets grace.Crystal Mason is a Black woman who casts a provisional ballot and was given a 5-year sentence.E.L.A. is an immigrant: a young Salvadoran asylum seeker who came to this country for asylum, and despite court orders, was deported. Twice.The woman—the Black woman, and the immigrant get the harshest penalties.Which brings me to Cornell.On September 28, a criminal investigation was reopened into allegations involving a former Cornell University student and members of Cornell’s student Greek fraternity, Chi Phi.Jane Doe has been trying to get justice since October 2024, because no one wanted to purse her case beyond school discipline.In a civil lawsuit filed this month, Doe alleges that she’d been drinking, went to the Chi Phi fraternity house, was pressured to take what she was told was ketamine, became increasingly impaired, and was sexually assaulted by multiple men over a period of hours.These are allegations. The men have not been convicted of these alleged assaults, and the reopened criminal investigation will have to determine what the evidence establishes.One particularly disturbing part of the complaint involves an alleged Snapchat group conversation among fraternity members. According to the lawsuit, messages alerted fraternity members that a woman was upstairs and available for sex. Doe alleges that additional men subsequently entered the room and that assaults continued for hours.She reported the incident to Cornell University Police. Cornell conducted its own disciplinary investigation. The university says the resulting sanctions included suspensions and expulsions, and Cornell permanently removed the Chi Phi chapter from campus.But criminal charges did not follow.Then, on September 14, 2026, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell, Chi Phi, seven former fraternity members and others, alleging negligence, sexual assault, sexual battery, breach of contract and other violations of New York law.So today, two weeks later, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced that he was reopening the criminal investigation and present evidence to a grand jury.And I couldn’t help thinking: Haven’t we been here before?White young man or men, sexual assault, no punishment. Yes, we have, with the case of Chanel Miller.In 2015, ...
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    20 分
  • SORRY DOESN’T GIVE TIME BACK

    SORRY DOESN’T GIVE TIME BACK
    2026/09/22
    There is nothing worse than looking into your child’s eyes and realizing they’ve been struggling—and somehow, you missed it. I know that look. And years later, I still carry the guilt.I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s devastating piece in The New York Times, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”That part—I could feel her daughter looking at her. “Did you know…when you decided to put me here?”The question hit me straight in the heart and took me back a number of years to my own guilt bomb.Flashback: 2023My dearest darling daughter was in her senior year of high school, and she was flailing.I can remember her soft brown eyes glancing up at me, filled with despair, like she had just realized her mother was human and not a superhero. In those small irises were water droplets and the look of failure.Seeing that in your child’s eyes is worse than a nightmare.My daughter had been homeschooled from the very beginning, and I can still remember clicking through the web searching for school programs, drilling through curricula—from IXL to Abeka—constructing strengths-and-weaknesses charts, researching resources, all nine yards, trying to choose a program that aligned with our family values and had the flexibility to accommodate an active-duty military man and a scientist-type, consulting, writer mom.Homeschooling fit the demands and worked until about third grade, when I realized Georgia’s limited homeschooling oversight could allow my child to miss key testing and other things. We decided to switch her to public school.We lucked out and found a hybrid county public school, Connections Academy. They had everything—or at least promise of everything. High praise from teachers and students, a solid curriculum, and the majority of the classes would still be taught in an online atmosphere . My daughter could continue to be at home or travel with me while attending school.I believed deeply in flexible, in-depth education. I still do. I believe in investing in my child’s education, so when there were weaknesses and I couldn’t help, I found tutors, sought out additional summer programs like Kumon, and did whatever was required to make sure my baby learned and enjoyed learning.From third through eleventh grade, my daughter got A’s and B’s.I thought she was fine.She wasn’t.In her senior year, my daughter cracked under the pressure. She had a pile of unfinished assignments, grades dipping toward D’s and F’s because of incompletes, and she started talking about not wanting to go to college. Then she admitted she had trouble reading and keeping up and that, when stressed, numbers floated.I was in shock.I reached out to the school for help. It took a while for the emails to return from the void, but there was no real help. Mandated county testing for this type of situation wasn’t a priority for them. Perhaps they, too, were shocked that an A-B student could have such problems. It soon became obvious that this excellent school didn’t have the resources or desire to be part of the solution.My husband and I had to save her on our own.We worked with our doctors to get her diagnosed.I was stunned by the diagnosis. My daughter had a learning disability that had gone undiagnosed for years.I’m not going to get too deeply into her private medical information. But some of its characteristics look like ADHD. It definitely bears anxious fruit, and it can affect her ability to perform certain mathematical processes. She required accommodations and a learning plan. Hubby and I had to implement them to get my daughter back to wanting to learn.Back to the PresentI read Hannah-Jones’s piece, and my heart broke for her and her daughter.A mother’s guilt knows no end.Something inside crumbles, ripping at our insides, when our child is in agony—or worse, when they look up with failure written in their eyes and they see it written in ours.How did we let this happen?These kids are right to put some of the blame on us. We are the busy, opinionated generation with all these high moral principles, but sometimes lacking the time to invest, dissect, and implement.My daughter is now thriving and enjoying her college experience, but part of me still bears this grief.How did I not see it?How many years of suffering happened because I missed the problem?Then guilt joins in:How could I have spent this much time thinking about my child’s education and not known?How could I not recognize that she was struggling? Sorry doesn’t cut it. We can’t give time back.I’ve learned that looks deceive. I had interpreted working around the clock as passion. You simply do that when you love learning.Maybe that belief kept me blind.Achievement can disguise struggle.You can love your child ferociously. You can research. You can advocate. You can pay attention. You can invest time and money. You can believe you are doing everything you’re supposed to do for them and the next generation—and still ...
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    21 分
  • Before She Says A Word

    Before She Says A Word
    2026/09/15
    The best dress in the room doesn’t need three paragraphs. Jane Austen can slay it in five words: “Their dress had every advantage.” Translation: fashionable, confident, ready for the room—but perhaps not much more.And Bob Mackie? He could obliterate us all, defining a character or a career with carefully sewn sequins.Before She Says A WordWhat Bob Mackie Taught Me About Dressing a Character“Their dress had every advantage, their faces were rather pretty, their spirits extremely good, their manner unembarrassed and pleasant; they were of consequence at home, and favourites abroad.”These lines open the fifth chapter of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Our heroine, Anne Elliot, is giving us what she saw of the Musgrove sisters, Henrietta and Louisa, as they entered the room—the cottage in Uppercross. Not once does Austen describe what the sisters are wearing, but the rest of the sentence fills our heads with an image. Austen is a masterclass in dressing for the room and the moment.That’s not a one-off. Austen uses Catherine Morland’s anxiety as she decides what to wear to a ball to highlight what it means for a young woman to realize she’s going to be looked at the minute she enters the room. In Mansfield Park, we get a little bit of color when Fanny Price hopes that her dress, a white dress, is not too fine. Mrs. Norris reassures her, “A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white.” None of this tells us the details, the trimmings of the dress. But again, it expresses the anxiety of a woman wondering if she’s holding up to the rules that society places on her. And it also gives us this very weak reassurance that she’s all right. Yet to the reader, the detail tells us so much about Fanny and Mrs. Norris.Now, while I love to spill on the details, partially because I’m a fabric-and-notion girly, Austen has made me more conscious of what I want the outfit to say about the person and the moment.So today’s essay is more about a designer whom Austen, once she got over the shock of the curve-hugging lines, might approve of: Bob Mackie, the gowns he designed, and the messages they spoke to the audience.Mackie the Industry VetRobert Gordon “Bob” Mackie was born March 24, 1939, in Monterey Park, California. He began his career as a sketch artist, working for major costume designers including Edith Head and Jean Louis. While working for Jean, the young Mackie drew the design sketch for Marilyn Monroe’s crystal-covered “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” gown.His early breakthrough came when Mitzi Gaynor hired him in 1966 for her Las Vegas revue and television specials. His designs became household legends with his work for The Carol Burnett Show. He designed for Burnett throughout the 11-year run, including the legendary green velvet curtain-rod dress for the skit, 1976 “Went with the Wind!”With Cher, Mackie became known in the music industry. His revealing, beaded designs for The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour helped make Mackie a household name; later creations included Cher’s dramatic 1986 Oscars feathered ensemble and the gown she wore to accept her 1988 Best Actress Oscar.Mackie designed for Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Liza Minnelli, Lola Falana, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Madonna, Beyoncé, RuPaul, and many others. He shared an Oscar nomination for costume design for Ross’s Lady Sings the Blues (1972) with Ray Aghayan and Norma Koch.He never stopped designing, and younger stars like Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Zendaya, and more have taken to Mackie like a rite of passage.Mackie and the LightAs I’ve studied the designs of the 1600s and the Georgian and Regency periods, I’m fascinated by silhouettes and fabrics. Every article and material indicates not only status but access and even the internals of a character. I’ve studied how candlelight can skip across silk, even change direction based on how the fabric is woven. I’ve learned to notice how the weight of velvet flows differently as a woman comes down stairs. My Lady Worthing mysteries are seasonal, so that is a fun thing to explore.Mackie knew the importance of light, particularly how beads throw light across a ballroom, how the shimmer can accentuate the length of a leg or arm, how swaying can start before a movement as well as linger when it’s done. His flame dresses, worn by Tina, Cher, Beyoncé, Miley, and probably more, are perfect examples of this balance.That is one of the reasons I have always loved Bob Mackie. Mackie understood something fundamental about clothes: the dress does not exist separately from the body. The light is entwined with the camera angles and the music, whether the performer is singing, acting, or offering a joke.Mackie and the EntranceSomething that I pay attention to is how a character enters a room. Is it dramatic? Does it follow a confrontation? And for those of us still hung up on the movie Sinners, we all understand what it means to be invited in.The entrance...
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    19 分
  • AI Is Hiding Bodies and Money

    AI Is Hiding Bodies and Money
    2026/09/08
    Writers, if you’re letting AI write your scenes, your chapters, or your books, I have one question: What exactly do you own? I went looking for answers and found the bodies—the AI Gamble can cost you everything.An influencer and trademark lawyer, Jennifer Brantley (@thefineprintlawyer on IG), posted a really interesting reel about why AI might be “hiding the bodies.”It was provocative, particularly in light of some of the publishing deals we’ve recently seen fall apart.I’ve talked before about the case of a young Black author reportedly on the verge of a nearly $2 million deal—only for the deal to collapse.Now, we don’t know exactly why that happened, and I don’t want to pretend that we do. But Brantley’s reel raised an interesting possibility: What happens when an agent or publisher loses confidence that the work they’re buying was actually written by the author?And more specifically: What happens when they don’t know how much AI was used to create it?That sent me straight down a research rabbit hole.Because Brantley brought up something I had not seriously considered before:AI-generated material may not be protected by copyright.Now, y’all know I occasionally play a lawyer on Substack. And as a historical-fiction writer, I spend an obscene amount of time researching things, weighing evidence, trying to figure out what actually happened versus what somebody merely said happened.So I went looking and found facts:In January 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability.In this report, the U.S. Copyright Office says:“Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material.” (page iii)Y’all see that? Getting ChatGPT, Claude, or any of the others to draft a novel means it can’t be copyrighted.The report also says:“Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.” This means the lawyers and the U.S. Copyright Office will have to play Solemn and split your baby into pieces, figuring out which parts belong to which mother.The part of the novel creation process where AI can be used for research and brainstorming is allowed, as I stated in Receipts Please, but if you think your human control comes from designing a prompt for the AI, guess again. According to the U.S. Copyright Office on page 18:“prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control.”In other words, simply typing an AI Prompt like, Write me a novel about X or a scene about Y or a chapter with A-P level of specificity, does not make you the author of that expression for purposes of copyright.Think about the danger you’ve put your idea in by having AI write it. There is a ton of what people call “AI slop” being sold right now—on Amazon and elsewhere. Books and other products that someone may have generated substantially or entirely with AI and then put into the marketplace.These products make money. Lack of copyright protection doesn’t magically claw back the money somebody already earned selling something.But what happens when somebody else copies that same AI-generated material?What exactly does the purported author own? What can they defend?I’ve had conversations with showrunners, and Hollywood is buzzing, hunting for unique IP, intellectual property. I’m talking about books being acquired for serious money—especially books with film and television potential. Copyrighted books are IP.Imagine somebody is prepared to invest seven figures in a property because it is deliciously marketable. Everybody can see the movie. Everybody can see the limited series. People want the rights.Except now, the buyers are asking who actually wrote this?If substantial portions of the manuscript were generated by AI, those portions may not have copyright protection. No one’s going to pay big bucks for 2/3 of a manuscript. And what stops the studio from now running with the idea without you? They can because there’s no copyright.Suddenly this isn’t merely an ethical debate about whether writers “should” use AI.It’s a chain-of-title problem.It’s a rights problem.It’s a due-diligence problem.It’s a very expensive problem.And to be clear, the Copyright Office is not saying that touching AI makes your book uncopyrightable.Quite the opposite.On page 41 of the report, the US Copyright Office says that using AI as an assistive tool does not prevent copyright protection. Human-authored material remains protectable. Human creative selection, editing, coordination, and arrangement may be protectable. Creative human modifications of AI-generated material may also qualify for protection.But this line drawn in the sand is fuzzy. Figuring out what one actually has is the new problem.If AI gives you something and you substantially transform it, what portion is yours?How much modification is enough?What constitutes sufficient human creative control?For those who ...
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    16 分
  • From GPS to Jolene

    From GPS to Jolene
    2026/09/01
    One gave us a better way to navigate the world. The other wrote songs that imagined a bigger one. But Gladys Mae West and Dolly Parton had something else in common: they outsmarted the stereotypes waiting for them.From GPS to JoleneLast week’s death of Dolly Parton and hearing the story of her roots got me thinking about another little Southern woman we lost earlier this year—Dr. Gladys Mae West. Now, Gladys Mae West and Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean are probably two names you wouldn’t expect to hear strung together in a sentence, much less an essay. But stay with me.I’d like to offer you a bit of knowledge about these two super women and who they became because of stereotypes.Dr. Gladys Mae West and Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean, both products of rural America, both faced stereotypes as obstacles to their success, and both understood education made a difference. Both changed the world.First, a little bit about Dr. West.Gladys Mae Brown was born in 1930 in rural Dinwiddie County, Virginia. This was Jim Crow Virginia. And America had a picture of a Black girl from the South: ignorant, incapable, intellectually inferior. So, opportunities for a Negro girl were limited. Her options were working in the tobacco fields, growing corn or cotton, or finding a position in the local tobacco-processing factory.Gladys Mae wanted something different. Education or book-learning called to her at an early age. She excelled in school, became valedictorian of her high-school class, and earned a scholarship to Virginia State College, now Virginia State University. There she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1952 and her master’s in mathematics in 1955.Think about those dates. She was fighting for higher education before Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. Segregation ruled the land as she pursued higher degrees in mathematics.In 1956, she was hired as a mathematician at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was the second Black woman hired there and one of only four Black professional employees at the facility. This was her big break in science. Gladys Mae became a programmer working on computers and sophisticated data satellites. In the 1960s, she helped study the relationship between Pluto and Neptune and worked on satellite ocean-monitoring projects.West used complex algorithms that accounted for gravitational, tidal, and other forces, and programmed an IBM 7030 computer to produce accurate mathematical models that became crucial to satellite geodesy and the precision of GPS.She worked at Dahlgren for 42 years. When she retired, she returned to school and earned a doctorate at Virginia Tech at age 70. This is a stupendous accomplishment for the girl who could have spent her life in a tobacco factory.It becomes extraordinary knowing that every time you pull out your phone and ask for directions or track a package, you’ve touched Dr. Gladys Mae West’s technology.When a plane finds its route, a ship crosses an ocean, an ambulance finds an address, your Uber or Lyft or Instacart finds you, it’s because of the little lady who didn’t let Jim Crow stereotypes stop her.Now that Other little Southern LadyDolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946 in rural Tennessee, one of twelve children.Her family was poor. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, couldn’t read or write. America had a stereotype for her, too: the poor, uneducated Appalachian hillbilly.But Dolly learned to read and write, and when she encountered the town tramp, she wasn’t reviled by this Appalachian woman. She was intrigued by her beauty and red fingernails. As Dr. Gladys Mae pushed away from the stereotypes, Dolly leaned in. She took that stereotype, put it in heels, added rhinestones, teased its hair toward the heavens, made it work for her, and started a music career.At age 10 she began writing songs and performing publicly. At age 13, she performed at the Grand Ole Opry and was introduced by Johnny Cash. She received 3 encores. After high school, she moved to Nashville to pursue music full-time and landed a spot on the Porter Wagner show in 1967. This gave her the opportunity to perform on TV and to continue developing her songwriting talents. We know her for “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5,” and “I Will Always Love You.”“I Will Always Love You,” written as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1974. Eighteen years later, Whitney Houston recorded her famous cover for The Bodyguard in 1992, and it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1992.Whitney Houston’s recording became one of the biggest-selling singles in music history. Dolly, who wrote the song and retained publishing rights, received royalties, some of which she donated to charities and invested in Black Nashville neighborhoods. Dolly is one of the most charitable singers in the world, having given through her foundation, the Imagination Library, money to provide free books ...
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    10 分
  • Euphoria

    Euphoria
    2026/08/25
    The Five-Minute High. Writers, you know that glorious feeling when you finally hit Send? Enjoy it. Because in about five minutes, you’re going to remember everything you should’ve changed.Euphoria: The Joy of Hitting SendThere’s a particular state of euphoria that happens when a writer finally hits Send.If you follow authors on social media—and hopefully you’re following me—you’ve seen us post about this magical, mythical thing called THE END.We celebrate it. We take pictures of it. We announce it to the world.And it is absolutely worth celebrating.But here’s the secret: the end isn’t really the end.It’s not the end until that book is published and out into the world.Still, one of the greatest moments in this entire process is when you attach that finished version of the document to your Trad editor’s email or if your Indie to your developmental or line editor’s email, and hit Send.There is nothing quite like it.Before the EuphoriaLet me back up for those who don’t know my process.I write the book, but I also work with a personal editor—someone who knows my gifts, knows my weaknesses, and, most importantly, knows how to push me.That editor is actually the first person who really sees the book.They see it as pages in the rawest, ugliest version. The version where someone has to say, “Girl, what were you thinking? I cannot get from A to Z with this.”Sometimes it’s not that bad.Sometimes it absolutely is.But that relationship matters. One of my editors has been with me for twenty-nine of my books. Think about that. They know my writing. They know what I’m capable of.That’s part of my process.Your process may look completely different.And that is exactly how it should be. Whatever it is, you work that process and finish.You Have to Get to the EndFor me, I have to hit the end.I need to write the book from beginning to end before I can step back and ask the most important question:What is this book really about?Now, if you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I am a serial outliner, serial timeline maker, serial spreadsheet girly.I do in-depth character analysis. I chart tension arcs. I study character journeys. I build character profiles. I work through scenes. And we haven’t even started talking about the historical research. That is an entirely different bucket.I do all of that work.And yet something organic still happens during the writing.Some arcs I imagined at the beginning become sharper and more important. Others disappear. A theme that seemed small suddenly becomes the heartbeat of the entire book. A character reveals something I didn’t fully understand when I started.That’s why I need to reach the end.Only then can I look backward and ask: What journey did I actually put these characters through? What changed? What survived? What is this story saying?Sometimes the answer is a deeper version of what I thought the book was about.Sometimes it is something completely different.But I cannot fully know until I get to the end.Stop Polishing Those First Three ChaptersWhen I was a young writer, I would polish and polish and polish those first three chapters.Then I would polish them some more.Now?Let’s just call me a pro.I know better.There is more than a fifty-percent chance that the synopsis I write before I start a book is not going to be the synopsis of the book I actually finish.That original synopsis is an educated guess. It is based on facts, research, character work, structure, and everything else I know at that moment.But it is still a guess.By the time I hit the end, I finally know what book I wrote.And then one of my favorite parts of the process begins.Editing.That is when we spit-shine the prose.That is when I deepen the dialogue so the words say what I need them to say while the subtext whispers everything the characters aren’t willing to admit.That is when I paint the house.That is when I put clothes on the characters—and those clothes need to do more than look pretty.Jane Austen understood that. Clothing can tell us about accomplishment, aspiration, money, status, personality, and how someone wants the world to see them. Is this a person of high style? Or did they just roll out of bed?Every detail should carry meaning.But I don’t necessarily know what the meaning should be until I know the whole story.Sprint to the EndSo, to every writer out there struggling to finish the book, my advice is simple:Finish the book.Work in sprints.Write out of order.Write the scenes in your head that are so vivid you can practically see the characters standing in front of you.Get words onto the page.You can stitch them together later.Don’t spend months polishing something when you don’t even know whether it belongs in the final book.Sprint toward the end.Dirty write.Put down the thoughts. Put down the dialogue. Put down enough description to remind yourself what is happening.Literally, anything can be fixed when you have reached the ...
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