Thank you, thank you , Garrison Keillor!

If you don’t subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac–you should. Every day you receive a poem and a bunch of wonderful information and insights into writers’ lives…for instance this long quote, worth the read, (below) arrived today about Elizabeth George–

“It’s the birthday of a woman considered by many to be the  greatest living mystery novelist, New  York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George,  born in Warren, Ohio  (1949). The London Times recently ranked her with Sir  Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie on its all-time best ‘masters of  crime’ list. She’s the author of the Inspector Lynley series, which includes  the titles Payment in Blood (1989), Well-Schooled in Murder (1990), In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (1999),  and A Traitor to Memory (2001).
  She grew up in Mountain View, California,  where Google is now headquartered. But back then, it was a sleepy, slightly  rundown town, which she’s described as ‘pre-pre-Silicon Valley.’ Her parents didn’t have that much  money, and trips to the public library were her family’s most constant form of  entertainment. She always knew she wanted to be a writer, and she wrote her  first novel when she was 12. It was a mystery in the Nancy Drew tradition.
  She graduated from college with an English major. Rather  than sitting down to write novels, which she knew was her calling, she did what  she calls the ‘Divine Dance of Avoidance.’ She was busy doing  everything except writing. She got a teaching credential, became a high school  English teacher, and got a master’s degree in counseling. Every summer break,  when she’d get 10 weeks off of school to write, she would be filled with anxiety  about starting a book, about whether her plot or characters would be any good,  or whether she’d be able to write convincingly, or whether she’d be able to  finish anything she started.
    And then, in 1983, her husband bought a computer in order to  write his graduate thesis. They’d never owned a computer, only typewriters, and  she said she knew it could make her ‘life as a writer much easier,’  to be able to cut and paste and edit on the screen. She chose to make it a  defining moment: When the computer arrived at their house, she said: ‘I  was faced with the simplest life question I’ve ever had to answer. I asked  myself whether, on my deathbed, I wanted to sigh and say, ‘I could have written  a novel’ or ‘I wrote a novel.’ Believe me, the answer was simplicity  itself.’
  She sat down on June 28, 1983, created a file called  ‘Simon’ on the IBM PC, and on September 5, she stood up,  having finished the first draft of her first English crime novel. It featured a  cast of characters that included Thomas Lynley, Simon St. James, Lady Helen  Clyde, and Deborah and Joseph Cotter. She called it Something to Hide, which, she later joked, ‘was pretty much  the recommendation of those who read’ the novel. The novel was rejected by  everyone she sent it to, but the people at Scribner’s said along with their  rejections some nice things about her writing style, and she was thoroughly  encouraged.
  She made a trip to England, wrote a second English crime  novel which was similarly rejected, made another trip to England the following summer,  and when she returned she had 42 days left until she needed to go back to the  classroom to teach high school English for the year. She felt like she’d come  up with a great plot, structure, and twist, and she was determined to write the  novel before school started up. So she sat down and wrote for 8 to 16 hours a  day. She finished the first draft of the novel in three and a half weeks. She  revised it and sent it off to an agent. The agent sold it Bantam Books, which  was just beginning a line of hardcover mysteries.
  The book was A Great  Deliverance, her first published title and the first in the Inspector  Lynley series, and it was a great success. She quit her high school teaching  job of 13 years and began writing full time.
  She writes five days a week when she’s working on the first  draft, and when she’s on subsequent drafts, she writes seven days a week. She  always gets up at 6 a.m., she says, feeds the dog and takes vitamins and works  out on an Exercycle for 30 minutes while reading a meditation book, then  inspirational book, then a novel. And she lifts weights for 35 minutes while  watching The Today Show. She  meditates for 10 minutes, sits down at her desk, reads great literature for  about 15 minutes — something along the lines of Jane Austen — and writes a  paragraph or page or two in a journal. And then she begins to work on the novel  she’s writing. She keeps a plot outline, and everyday she writes a minimum of  five pages, even if she’s on the road for book tours or on vacation.
  George said, ‘The only way to succeed at the  writing life is to be able to live according to a schedule that accommodates  time to write.’ Her newest Inspector Lynley novel, This Body of Death (2010), comes out this April.”