Birthdays: Maurice Francis Egan (1852), Elizabeth Foreman Lewis (1892), Kathleen Hale (1898), Mikhail Shokolov (1905), William Trevor (1928), Joseph Brodsky (1940), Bob Dylan (1941), Michel Chabon (1963), Mo Willems (1968)

Elizabeth Lewis won the 1933 Newbery Award for “Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze”

Mikhail Shokolov won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Joseph Brodsky won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature

Quote: “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.” – Michel Chabon

Tip: In plurals, spelling can be vastly different for similar words, especially in the English language. For instance: one goose, two geese. But we do not say one moose/two meese. One mouse/two mice but one house/two houses. If you’re not sure, look it up.

Jumpstart: If you could have any celebrity act the part of your main character. Who would you choose? Why? Would anything have to change for this person to play your character? What and why?