Stop the Presses!
I've always been ambivalent about having cut my teeth in the cigar-hazed city room of the Los Angeles Times , then a 1960s metropolitan newspaper with more editorial lineage than any other nationwide. That was back in the days when "stop-the-presses" could be taken literally! I can never figure out if that initiation by printers' ink sharpened or dulled me as a latter-day author. My early years as a journalist, followed by decades of magazine freelancing and sitting behind an editor's desk certainly instilled me with deadline discipline and fetishes for facts, factoids and specificity. I've always feared my nose would grow if I didn't get whatever I was writing right. It was always a balancing act on the high wire of deadlines. Self-doubt and existential angst be damned! Get it right, or leave it out. Get your best in on time. But no dithering. To succeed, the working journalist must become tougher than the average literary bear. Mary Ford - author of...