Morning Inspiration:

Today’s entry on Garrison Keillor’s Writer's Almanac about novelist Richard Ford gave me great heart and hope:

“It's the birthday of novelist Richard Ford, born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). He tried hotel management, law school, substitute teaching, and coaching baseball. He wrote two novels, and they got good reviews but didn't sell many copies. So he gave up writing fiction and got a job as a sportswriter at a magazine called Inside Sports, and he loved that job and thought he would be happy to stay there his whole life. But then the magazine went out of business; he couldn't find a job, so he went back to writing fiction. His first novels featured tormented characters, and his wife told him to try writing a book about somebody happy for a change.

“So he wrote about a normal, likeable guy named Frank Bascombe, who gives up a career as a fiction writer to write for a sports magazine. He wrote about 150 pages and showed them to his editor, who told him to throw the book away. Richard Ford finally decided to ignore his editor and finish the book, which he called The Sportswriter (1986), and it was his first big success. He wrote two more novels about Frank Bascombe, both of them successful: Independence Day (1995), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Lay of the Land (2006).

“He said: ‘I wanted to write this novel in the first person, and in the present tense. The novel gets to say we're present tense here, and yet we can read the present over and over again. Which is quite a nice thing to do. We'd all be better off if we could not stop time but slow it down a little bit, and live the pleasant things more pleasantly and live the incautious things more cautiously.’”