Birthdays: Grazia Deledda (1871), Jim Thompson (1906), Nicholas Mordvinoff (1911), Louis Auchincloss (1917), Ernest Becker (1924), Bernard Waber (1924), Paul Goble (1933), Katie Fforde (1952), Martin Handford (1956), Irvine Welsh (1958), Jonathan Evison (1968),

Grazia Deledda won the 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature for “Reeds in the Wind”

Nicholas Mordvinoff won the 1952 Caldecott Medal for “Finders Keepers”

Ernest Becker won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction for “The Denial of Death”

Paul Goble won the 1979 Caldecott Medal for “The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses”

Quote: “Keep doing good deeds long enough and you’ll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.” ― Louis Auchincloss

“If you are prepared to persevere, listen to good advice, recognise bad advice, read a lot and accept it may take many years, you probably will get published, eventually.” – Katie Fforde

Tip: Different types of editing include: Developmental (checks for weak scenes, boring parts, plot inconsistencies, structure—the big picture); line editing (word choice, sentence construction, tags, etc.); copyedit (nitty gritty of grammar, punctuation, spelling, trademarks, etc.), and proofread (final overall look). If you hire an editor to go over your work, be sure you know what you’re getting.

Jumpstart: You wake up one morning, ready to start the day, but when you go into the bathroom, there’s a message on the mirror in your handwriting. It tells you not to go out. There are more notes over the house warning you not to go out. But it’s a beautiful day and you’ve been cooped up for days. What do you do? When did you write the notes and why?