You Don't Fight To Protect Warships Or

As A Younger Man I Wrote For Eight Years Without Ever Earning A Nickel Which Is A Long Apprenticeship, But In That Time I Learned A Lot About My Trade.

The Chief Character In This Narrative Is The Caribbean Sea, One Of The World's Most Alluring Bodies Of Water, A Rare Gem Among The Oceans, Defined By The Islands That Form A Chain Of Lovely Jewels To The North And East

Not Too Many People Work In A Job Where, Waiting Out There Are Three Or Four Hundred People Who Are Paid To Tear Apart What You've Done. And Often They Are Brighter Than You Are, Or They Know More About The Subject Than You Do, Or They Wish They Had Written A Book Themselves, Or Done A Lot Better. Or They Just Don't Like It! And You Have To Live With It.

Organizations Like The Church Or General Motors Promote A Man Up And Up Until He Reaches A Spot Which He Is Obviously Incapable Of Filling, And There They Lay Him To Rest.

The Rules Seem To Be These: If You Have Written A Successful Novel, Everyone Invites You To Write Short Stories. If You Have Written Some Good Short Stories, Everyone Wants You To Write A Novel. But Nobody Wants Anything Until You Have Already Proved Yourself By Being Published Somewhere Else.