Lately I’ve been working on writing a book with an associate who I also count as a friend. He invited me to help him with the project, which he’d already written a first draft of in very rough form, and we’ve been passing the manuscript back and forth, adding to it, deleting from it, making other changes large and small to the words and descriptions, resolving plotholes, and rearranging chapters.

When my mother was in high school, many decades ago, she was compelled to learn Latin. By the time of my own high school years—also long ago—Latin was no longer compulsory, but it was still offered.

Who said, “The U.S. and Great Britain are two nations divided by a common language”? This oft-repeated and unquestionably true saying has been variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. In truth, they may all have said it at one time or another, though who said it FIRST, who ORIGINATED the saying, is an entirely different question. It is, however, one we need not answer here. (For my readers who are left wondering, it couldn’t have been Churchill; Wilde and Shaw preceded him considerably. But let us get back to the thrust of this blogpost.)

Some people still have a mistaken idea of the writing life. They envision a writer curled up in the corner of her couch, laptop in lap, leisurely writing. Or perhaps she’s sitting alongside a babbling brook, drawing inspiration from nature as she pens what she hopes will be her best-seller.

Do you have the urge to write? Maybe there’s something specific you want to write: your memoir, or a children’s story—perhaps one you originally made up to tell your own child—or a compilation of recipes you collected in the course of your travels, or a novel set in Camelot involving one of King Arthur’s knights, or a how-to or inspirational book on maintaining a positive attitude in the face of difficulties. Or maybe you’ve been bitten by the writing bug and been left with an amorphous desire to write but no specific idea of what you want to write.

The freelance life is a precarious one. Unless you’re a JK Rowling, Danielle Steele, you don’t pull in enough royalties to survive let alone thrive. So writing books full time is out of the question. You have to have another gig to pull in income. Yet you want to remain a freelancer.

How many of us remember learning to read? Wasn’t it magical? It unlocked a whole world for us—the world of the written word.

What I’ve got is not writer’s block, but it’s impeding me all the same. Writer’s block is that dread affliction that causes a writer to sit down to work on their work-in-progress, or to begin it, if all they have is the title, the concept, and perhaps an outline…but when they put fingers to keys, they’re stymied. The words won’t come.

An online newsletter I subscribe to contains queries from journalists, book authors, broadcasters, and others who seek input for articles, books, broadcast/podcast shows, and other media. Lately there has been a rash of queries seeking suggestions for gifts for people of varous demographis—by age, by occupation, by avocation. These articles the queries are for suggest gifts for people in their 20s, 40s, retirement age, pregnant women, new graduates, sports lovers, wine lovers….and of course, gifts for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, Valentines Day and Christmas. Sometimes these queries are specifically looking for books; other times the queries are more open-ended—any...

In a world that’s ever more digital, a group of students at Yale have protested over the school library’s plan to relocate a trove of books from the Bass Library, bringing the library’s holdings down from 150,000 books to just 40,000.