My parents gave me a book called Lost Treasure Trails by Thomas Penfield when I was twelve years old. I was enthralled, fascinated, intrigued. The chapters covered buried and sunken treasures and lost mines. I loved it. That year when we visited the Florida Keys, I insisted that we stop at Art McKee’s Sunken Treasure Museum on Plantation Key. Art McKee (http://www.keyshistory.org/Art_McKee.html) was a Florida diver who built the museum to house some of the items he found diving the Spanish wrecks. These items included one of three silver bars (he sold the other two to the Smithsonian), and jewelry that featured a beautiful gold and emerald earring. The emerald, cut and polished as a drop,
One reason for the Beatles’ success, I read somewhere, was the many, many hours they spent as a back-up band and working small gigs. This gave them the practice to hone their ability and produce the professional polish to reach worldwide success. Add to this a report I once read about businesses in a certain area of Virginia. The report clearly showed that the longer a company was in business, the more the number of employees and the higher the earnings. I’ve been watching a Great Courses series on writing fiction with James Scott Bell . In one segment, he says that no one knows what makes a bestseller. Despite all the effort at marketing and promotion, the best a writer can do is write
