Authors Electric

At the start of December 2019, I gave myself a gift of learning. I'd seen numerous ads for MasterClass while searching for interesting gifts for the holiday season.  If you're unfamiliar with MasterClass, it's a streaming platform of online courses that started in 2015 with a simple pitch: Famous people teach you about the thing that made them famous. At the time, the courses that interested me most were from writers: Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few. MasterClass, however, includes instructors from all walks of life—from Dr. Jane Goodall who teaches Conservation to Helen Mirren who teaches Acting to Annie Leibovitz who teaches Photography.  You can either purchase a specific course along with its instructional videos and workbooks, or buy an annual membership which gives you unlimited access to all the classes, including new ones that are added during the year.  I decided to pick up an annual subscription and a second ...

Late bloomers are lazy; they don’t put in the effort needed to develop their God-given talents. Or, they’ve been thwarted by the roadblocks life throws in their path: poverty, pregnancy, sheer bad luck. Some late bloomers don’t get discovered in time. All of them are old. It doesn’t really matter how old. You can find lists of 20 under 20 in pretty much every walk of life: sports, entertainment, business. If you inch up to 35 under 35, you’ll find game changers and innovators. But folks older than that don’t make it into lists anymore. No one cares about late bloomers. When I was in my 20s, I showed some promise as a poet . Then I let the flame die. Entered into that most soul-crushing of professions: the law. I threw my talent away and, as a result, don’t deserve a second chance. But here I am, in my 50s, starting a whole new career as a writer. Career-switching is a thing these days. There are a thousand and one reasons why, say, a journalist chooses to become a hi...