These days, it’s rare to get paid for blogging.  Blogging has been the great insult to professional authors in the last decade.  We’re now asked to break our first cardinal rule as writers who also need to eat, and donate our work for free (for the sake of that branding age buzz word, the PLATFORM), which is ridiculous.  It’s fine to write for free, for yourself, but to do so when publishers are getting rich offends decorum and rightness. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” said Samuel Johnson, who invented the English dictionary.

I don’t quite agree but it is a pleasure to be paid to blog, as I’m learning with this new site, Purple Clover.  Peggy Northrop, a friend and editor, wrote to me a few months back, inviting me to join the team of start up writers. I haven’t been on a team since I worked at Interview 30 years ago and it’s great!  Being able to write what I want, with helpful but not intrusive editing, is a pleasure.  Here are my two most recent pieces, something about aging and sex appeal, and another post on forgiveness.  If you enjoy these pieces, I’d appreciate you “liking” them on the Purple Clover site.  I want these folks to keep me around.

FORGIVE OR FORGET IT

Friendships are the great overlooked love affairs of our lives. On the hierarchy of emotional connections, we place even our dearest friends several rungs beneath lovers and family, and only slightly higher than colleagues, all too often, in the pecking order of who gets attention.
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AGE IS WHAT MAKES US SEXY

I know a person who’s having a midlife crisis. It isn’t a secret; that’s part of the crisis. His issue comes down to an excess of sex that he talks about excessively. His best friends don’t mind that he’s scoring more than LeBron James in a heated playoff — they just wish he’d stop flaunting it.
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