Hey everyone. My new book, Beautiful Writers, a journey of big dreams and messy manuscripts

with tricks of the trade from bestselling authors, is ready for pre-order. Those authors are the

legends you hear here on this very show. Beautiful Writers Pubbs on August 23rd, and if you purchase the book now and plug in your

order number over on bookmama.com, you will receive lots of really cool writerly pre-order

bonuses to help you birth your own book baby.

I even send you personalized book plates to include in your books for holiday gifts with

five or more orders. I mean, how much easier is that than trying to re-gift used candles?

I love when wins. And now for the show.

I asked myself why the prospect of losing 13 scrolls, two vials of ink, two reed pens,

three clean sheets of papyrus, and a bowl set off such desperation in me. Only now do I see the

immensity I assigned to these objects.

They not only represented those fragile stories I wanted to preserve.

They also held the full weight of my craving to express myself, to lift out of my small

self, out of the enclosure of my life, and find what lay beyond.

I wanted for so much. Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was? I asked my sister.

We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch house, in the broad daylight of early summer.

The linden trees kept us from seeing anything except the linden trees.

I had thought the trees were enormous

when I was young, but they'd kept right on growing. Maybe one day they'd grow into the wall of

Andrea's dreams. I'd see the past as it actually was, Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now,

so we're not seeing it as the people we were.

...