Read and Write with Natasha
This podcast discusses writing life, reviews books, and interviews authors and industry professionals.
Read and Write with Natasha
Writing at 89: James Flaherty on purpose and aging with vitality
What if pursuing your passions could redefine aging?
Meet James Flaherty, 89, who’s added not just years but vitality to his life. Starting his writing journey later, Jim has authored four books, including his latest, Embrace Your Age, a reflection on aging with a purpose that challenges the idea of “feeling old.” In this episode, he shares his insights on staying active and positive through the years, plus stories of friends who chose a different path.
James' career kicked off in 1957 as a New York copywriter on a tight budget. Since then, he's navigated life and work from NYC to Buenos Aires, all while balancing family and creative growth. Decades later, he’s still writing daily, showing that dedication can last a lifetime.
Tune in to hear about James' daily habits—simple routines that keep him grounded, healthy, and connected. With each day he embraces as a gift, Jim’s story reminds us: life is yours to keep writing, no matter the age.
****************************************************************************
➡️ 𝗣.𝗦: If you found my content useful, you might want to check out my newsletter, in which I share the ups and downs of the writing journey: https://natashatynes.substack.com/
Oh, okay, I'm going to tell you a wonderful story. My father died when I was very young. He was the district attorney of Miami and I was 14, going on 11. And so I had a brilliant mother who raised me, and when I was about 20, she said every morning of your life you're going to have to confront your biggest critic. You're the toughest enemy in your life. It's that person in your bathroom mirror and you can either grimace and groan and go good God another day, or smile bravely and cheerfully and say good God another day and she's going to go out and grab it.
Speaker 2:And I got to tell you.
Speaker 1:I do not wake up depressed, I wake up with that goal, with that purpose.
Speaker 2:Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha podcast. My name is Natasha Tynes and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel I talk about the writing life, review books and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Read and Write with Natasha. I have with me today author Jim Flahart, who's an optimistic octogenarian I had to Google this, by the way and an octogenarian who's a person who's between 80 and 89 years old. He has a bright future. He has written four books in his 80s. He lives now in a converted 1940s dairy barn in the foothills of the Berkshires, 80 miles north of Manhattan. He's 89 and has the answers for you. All right, jim, what a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for coming on my podcast. Wow, I'm so excited to talk to you and learn from your wisdom. Wow, 89, you're a legend.
Speaker 1:A legend in my own time. I have a t-shirt that says a legend in my own mind.
Speaker 2:Wow great I see copies of your books behind you. I love that. So, Jim, you're 89, you wrote four books and you started writing in your 80s.
Speaker 1:Well, I wrote the two bottom books here, which are both fiction novels. I wrote those in my late 70s. I wrote the top two books in my 80s. They're about aging cheerfully and productively. Cheerfully and productively Because as I hit 80, I saw so many people that I knew had been sticks of dynamite in their 40s, 50s and 60s suddenly retreating from life. And I said what are you doing? Get up, start living again. Don't tell me. They said no, I'm old now. Nobody wants me. I said what absolute BS. I don't want to hear it, I don't want to see it. I want you to get up and live. There's an old saying which is very true you are as old as you think. And if you think old, you get old. And I say to people you know the band won't stop playing until you stop dancing. So what Shall we dance, let's do something.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's nice. So what made you decide to start writing at an advanced age? I mean, what was the trigger for you?
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll make it short my history. I've always been a writer. I came to New York out of college, my first job. I'll make it short my history. I've always been a writer. I came to New York out of college, my first job. I took home $200 a month after taxes, with no allowance from home.
Speaker 2:That's a fortune, it was 1957.
Speaker 1:It wasn't quite as pricey as right now, but I was living really under the poverty line. But it was fine. I was so excited about being in New York because I grew up in Coral Gables, florida, before air conditioning. Anyway, I was so happy to be in New York that I went to work an hour early and I became a copywriter and I thought this is really nifty. I had a degree in communications but I didn't know what the hell it was for and I thought I really love this sitting and writing about things. And shortly after that, the next year, I was in the army earning $80 a month and I got married.
Speaker 1:We did things back then in the 50s. You had to do that. You got out of college, you got a job. You never went back to live with your parents. You had to be self-supporting. You would meet the girl or boy of your dreams, get married and have children. Boom, it was engraved in titanium on your skull. So I got married. We were having babies, we had zero money, we lived in Denver, we lived in Syracuse, we lived way out in Brooklyn. But suddenly, at age 33, because I worked hard and because I loved doing what I was doing, as a writer. I found myself in a corner office in New York as a writer, creative director. I became a madman. If you saw the TV series, that was basically the story of my life, except I used to say the only difference is that no one ever got laid or drunk in my office. I didn't allow it.
Speaker 2:So you were the Don Draper of your time.
Speaker 1:Yes, I was Absolutely. It was very right on in terms of what my life was.
Speaker 2:As handsome as Don Draper no.
Speaker 1:I was never that sexy or handsome I didn't think I was 6'3 and a half, you know and I dressed very well.
Speaker 1:Okay, you know, yeah, hey it's okay and I stayed mainly in New York. I did four years in Argentina as the creative director of J Walter Thompson in Buenos Aires that was interesting and then back to New York and then, when my mid-40s, I jumped off the mountain and started a business I knew nothing about. I created a country and conference center and ran it and it became nationally famous. I worked 70 hours a week doing it and I can say right now for all of you entrepreneurs out there, I don't know how you can run a business which you don't know how to write. It required an immense amount of writing of brochures and letters and everything to create the atmosphere and the mood and the publicity. Anyway, then when that was over although I didn't sell it until 2016,.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, I was living a very nice life. I had a villa in Acapulco, I was traveling around the world, I was having a good time and always writing. I go back to writing. It's crucial to me. I always said that life would be what was. I have some wonderful quotes about writing. Jorge Luis Borges, whom we all knew and loved, said I've always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library, and I feel the same way as long as I have a book in my hand and when I traveled so much, I used to say I would have 10 or 12 books in my suitcase, which was not real smart. But then they invented the Kindle and I have 1,500 books on my Kindle.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, that's more than me.
Speaker 1:I have a library with me all the time. So I'm never without a book. I am never, ever without a book and I love it. So I still love writing and I write every day, every day. And when I have work to do, I have a rule especially if I'm heading for a deadline, I'll get up in the morning and not go and have breakfast first in my 30 minutes of exercise in the pool. I have an interior pool in my house.
Speaker 2:Oh, I want to come visit you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're welcome, darling. There's always a guest room and you would love the food. You would love the food. People ask to be invited to dinner because the food is so good and sometimes I'll get up in the morning, just put on a roast, splash some water in my face, come right in and work for an hour before I start the day Not open email, not anything. Just come in and work, because every night I make a list of the six or seven things I want to do today and I try to tackle them first thing in the morning. I mean, that's my schedule.
Speaker 1:Every line is a day.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're busy.
Speaker 1:And I try to keep up with it. It's good. It's good. Listen, I have a reason to get up. I have a goal, I have a purpose. That's very important. Whether you're a writer or a reader or an artist, or you want to compose or build or plant or cook, you got to have a purpose. You have to have a reason, and then you wake up with a smile.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I never wake up depressed.
Speaker 1:I wake up thinking of wow, I've got this to do today. Another opportunity to see, hear, right. So the question is how did you publish your books?
Speaker 2:Did you go? Self-publishing publisher? What was it?
Speaker 1:Well, okay, the bottom two were what I call vanity press, not big traditional publishers, because you know, the problem back then and now is that it doesn't matter who you are and I don't. At age 89, and I'm not in a corner office in New York, I don't have those personal contacts in the publishing industry. I'm a successful nobody and unless you have an important agent, unless you have an agent, you are not going to be in touch with the traditional publishers. The top two are strictly self-published, which isn't bad. Now, self-publishing now has a few advantages.
Speaker 1:One, you get a bigger commission on sales and two, it's up to you to get out there, which is always the pain in the neck is to get up and to do all the marketing, to do all the social media and all the advertising and give the speeches and the book signings and all of that stuff.
Speaker 2:It's very important, so did you hire a team to help you with the self-publishing?
Speaker 1:You know I tell new writers I say don't worry about trying to get a traditional publisher unless your uncle owns HarperCollins. You know, because chances are you're not going to unless you just happen to have the ability to write that flawless piece of literature that somebody reads. But basically you have to have somebody say here, come, look at it, I would love to have an agent, because I think both of my novels are terrific fully full length features or TV series and I wrote them that way. I mean they're really very good adaptable stories. I know that they're really very good adaptable stories. I know that, uh, I'm very commercial in my mind.
Speaker 2:Maybe because of all my advertising years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't. I don't write just to amuse myself. I try to think what's going to sell? What do people want to read? Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:So like I'm looking at the covers and they're actually nice covers. So did you? Did you a team? Do you have a specific team that you work with to self-publish? What is your self-publishing process like?
Speaker 1:are millions of people. You could either go on Fiverr, 5RR and find a freelancer to do a cover for no money at all. I went to a studio called Cutting Edge in Holland, and the head of the studio is an author himself.
Speaker 1:And they gave me four samples on each of the first two books and I told them what I had in mind for the first book. They did that, came up with their own, which I love the People Walking on a Beach because it's called Dear Old Friends and it's a younger couple and an older couple and a young man. And then the second one I said I just want to say you know, embrace your age. And then the second one I said. I just want to say, you know, embrace your age, Embrace your age.
Speaker 1:And then the subtitle says you can be better than ever. And they took my thought and did that, and I like the simplicity of it. It's nice and clear. And the bottom two, the one here is the role of a lifetime. It's about a woman who reinvents herself and becomes on stage. It's pure fiction. It's Broadway, hollywood, international travel, romance, sex, everything. It's fiction. And so I've got that picture of the back view of somebody standing in front of an audience. So you know it's theater. And this one which says Claire, wife, mother, mistress, murder, is a painting of my younger daughter done by a friend of hers in college, and she said well, I've never murdered anyone.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's see, so you've been, since you self self-published. There's a lot of marketing push on your end. How are you marketing these books?
Speaker 1:I've not been as good at it as I should be okay, and I I recommend to people that if you, unless you really don't have 10 pesos in your pocket, hire somebody to handle your social media for you. I hated it. I didn't want to do it. Now I'm getting better about it. Now I'm doing LinkedIn and Alignable and now and then Facebook and some of those things, but you really have to do these days in this world.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is a social media world, so you really have to have somebody out there where you're putting in a word now and then about yourself. I mean, I met, I was in a meeting, I did a two-day seminar with Jack Canfield who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul for the Soul.
Speaker 1:That and along with all the variations of Chicken Soup for the Chicken Soup for the Podcaster, Chicken Soup for the Nurse Chicken Soup right, they sold 600 million copies of, I mean. And they did it with putting Jack into social media, with him talking to everybody and he's a darling man, I mean very, very appealing, you know. So I'm doing a lot of public speaking now and I'm doing things like I get to meet with beautiful Natasha and get to talk about reading and writing, which I love to do. Will that sell books? I don't know. It will make my name better known.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And maybe somebody will hear embrace your age. That sounds like a good thing when I'm concerned about being 60 years old and starting to feel old.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's very inspiring. At my age 48, sometimes I think, like you know, the ship has already sailed, you know. And then that you know I'm too old for success. And you know, like you have all these thoughts because you have the idea that success is only in your 20s and 30s and if you don't make it, then you're, you're done.
Speaker 1:no, Natasha, because it's I'm a great fan of and I belong to an organization called Modern Elder Academy and it's wonderful and I go to their workshops because the the workshops are brilliant and they deal helping people through the messy middle, which are ages 35 to 75. And they say that with age comes something called wisdom. I've laughed about it, thinking even though I don't want to be in the advertising world now because it's very different it's all digital and explosive and graphics and things where before I thought it was based on ideas and beautiful visuals and some intelligent thinking behind advertising. But I thought in my 60s I realized, gee, I would have been a much better creative director than I was in my 30s and 40s Because in my 60s I had more wisdom about you and about everybody else.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And about what fell and what is correct and what moves people, what emotionally matters. You know, I mean, I think with age there are many, many advantages with age. When you're a creative person, you know, I mean, I think you can be realistic. By the way, I teach writing and when I'm teaching writers I say I'm going to give you a very important lesson. Whatever you write, whether even an email, but especially if you're writing fiction or nonfiction, you read something. You're thinking there wow, hot stuff. Read it out loud. Don't read it to yourself. Reading it to yourself, your eye will go over Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. But your brain will hear it and say what are you nuts? Or that's illiterate, or that's stupid and it doesn't flow. So you read it out loud and you hear it. Sometimes, when I'm reading a wonderful book, I will read the book out loud just because I want to hear the language that the author is using. Or if it's in an accent, I'll read it with a slight accent to get in the feeling of it.
Speaker 2:So what is your day-to-day like as an 80-year-old author. As an 89-year-old author?
Speaker 1:89, yeah, I get, I'm always up by 730. Unless I'm in one of my early, I have to write first thing in the morning for an hour, which is a very good habit. I wish I did it every day. Normally. I first thing in the morning for an hour, which is a very good habit. I wish I did it every day Normally. I get up in the morning, I turn around and make my bed, even though I have a full-time live-in nanny. I hired her 24 years ago and she's still with me taking care of me. I make my bed, I go out, I have my breakfast, which is all fruit, nothing else, all fruit, go down to my pool, 30 minutes of serious exercise, heavy breathing exercise in the pool, come up, shower, shave, get dressed for the day, then I start work, and I might work until 7.30 or 8.30 at night if I have that much to do. Otherwise, I'll try to get smart. I'll have my one other meal around four o'clock.
Speaker 2:I only have two meals a day. You skip lunch.
Speaker 1:Don't need it. I don't need that. I don't need to eat that much, and I have a big dinner at four o'clock and it's a very healthy dinner. And I weigh 10 pounds less than I weighed at the end of basic training in the army. Of course, I'm three and a half inches shorter. I've shrunk to six feet now. I'm only six feet tall now, but I only weigh 162. So I keep myself because I know it's healthier.
Speaker 1:My doctor says there's nothing wrong with you, he said, besides the fact that you're irritating, you know what so?
Speaker 2:what is the secret to your longevity?
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to tell you a wonderful story. My father died when I was very young. He was the district attorney of Miami and I was 14, going on 11. And so I had a brilliant mother who raised me. And when I had a brilliant mother who raised me, and when I was about 20, she said every morning of your life you're going to have to confront your biggest critic, you're the toughest enemy in your life. It's that person in your bathroom mirror and you can either grimace and groan and go good God another day, or smile bravely and cheerfully and say good God another day, or smile bravely and cheerfully and say good God another day. And she said go out and grab it and I got to tell you.
Speaker 1:I do not wake up depressed. I wake up with that goal, with that purpose, because I know what I'm working on all the time. Besides the books, I'm working on another book. I finished an original TV series. I have a screenplay. I've got enough to go. That's why I say I have a 10-year plan. I can't possibly. Oh, a great story for you George Burns, a wonderful comedian. On his 95th birthday. A reporter asked him, mr Burns, do you ever worry about dying? He said I can't die now.
Speaker 1:I'm booked and I'm the same way I'm booked. And so what's the secret? The secret is to have a goal and a purpose, a reason to wake up, and to wake up not thinking about, oh, this is wrong and that's wrong. Think about what's right, have gratitude for the fact that you've been given the gift of another day and get out and do it, and you'll feel so much better. When I'm having a good writing day, I'm just full of energy. Boy, I could dance. I feel so good.
Speaker 2:What about daily habits, like daily healthy habits that you would recommend Exercises?
Speaker 1:Okay, well, you're hearing it from me. I'm having two meals, two very healthy meals. We do not eat bread in this house, except for dinner parties. We don't have potatoes. We have pureed cauliflower, I have wonderful fish or I have beef once a week, a really good piece of beef but we have fish or chicken or pork, and yesterday I had for dinner and it was fabulous. I told my nanny this morning how incredible it was. We had stuffed poblanos and she normally would stuff them and have some chicken. She said it's pure vegetarian and it was a fantastic dinner. I mean I would serve it cheerfully at any dinner party. It was so good. So I think you eat well. You shoot for eight hours of sleep. If you settle for seven, that's fine, that's good enough. You'll be healthy enough. Do you know what the blue zones are? Have you ever heard of that, the blue zones? Yeah, well, I've studied that. I did a workshop with Dan Buettner who wrote that, and I've taught it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I saw that on Netflix documentary.
Speaker 1:I've taught blue zones too, so you eat well, you get. I've taught blue zones too, so you eat well, you get your sleep. You must exercise. It really is important Whether you just take a walk. Not all people have a pool in their house. I do. It's something I've had for 40 years. I decided if I'm going to live in New York, a pool outside is pretty, but you can only use them about two months a year and people never use them. They just look at them. That's stupid.
Speaker 1:I use my pool every day. The only day I don't is Sunday morning. I get up especially early, shower and get dressed, have my all fruit breakfast and go to church. And I go to church and I rehearse and I sing in the choir and I'm an elder in the church, and that's another thing. And I'm an elder in the church, and that's another thing. Folks, it doesn't hurt to have faith. I have a rabbi friend who calls me a collapsed Catholic because I'm an elder in a Presbyterian church. I'm a directing elder of the church and statistics show if you go to a house of worship four times a month, you live four to eight years longer.
Speaker 1:Hey interesting statistic right, and it's true. And the rest of statistics show that the more connections you have in life and I'm not talking about business connection the more friends and acquaintances you have, the longer you live. It's very, very important Living alone and embracing loneliness is wrong and very, very unhealthy. And I am alone all day long, most of the time working, but then once or twice a week, some one person will come over and have my four o'clock dinner with me, and now and then we'll have a dinner party.
Speaker 1:And then I go to church every Sunday, so I'm around people all the time I'm going to the local theater. Tonight we have a playhouse down the road. I was in our town last year. I took a role.
Speaker 2:Good for you. And what about your wife?
Speaker 1:I have been widowed twice.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm sorry to hear it. Yeah, and been widowed twice.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm sorry to hear it. And guess what? And the last time was we had three and a half years of dementia, first to deal with Boy. Does that take you into who you are? You 24-7, you're taking care of somebody. You love watching them slip away, cell by cell. It's very, very, very tough. But it's been three years and I'm okay, I'm all right. My children, my daughters, are still wonderful and they both still love me. They laughingly say a nice, conscientious, sweet father of 89 would just go to bed and not wake up and leave his children some money. But no, not you, you'll live forever, just to spite us. I say yes, which is what they want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, with that amount of lifestyle you have, you're going to outlive us all.
Speaker 1:I have no intention of waking up on the wrong side of the grass anytime soon. I really don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, do you think the army had to do something with that discipline that you have?
Speaker 1:No, I think I was born with it and raised with it. My sweet dear mother said. Dear mother said oh, I also. I almost forgot. I found and embraced a quote from, of all people, noel Coward, that British wit and wag from years ago, and I still love it and I teach it when I'm mentoring younger groups. I do a lot of speaking to high schools and colleges Listen to this, natasha, you'll love it. Work is more fun than fun, and it is you know.
Speaker 1:friends who know me say Jim, you know Flaherty we know you, you could float around a pool all day with a margarita in your hand and I said you know that I could only do that for about 15 minutes. And then I'd say okay, that's enough of that, let's do something, let's produce something. I mean, I created a business I knew nothing about. I had to work 70 hours a week for 10 years to make that happen. I did it and it was fine. I loved doing it. Hey, it's better than watching television all day.
Speaker 2:Which yeah, so do you drink alcohol?
Speaker 1:no. On my 80th birthday I thought, okay, you've lived till 80, which I didn't expect to be, that. None of the flaherty's had been long livers. And here I was at 80, perfectly healthy, and I thought all right, what are you gonna do for your 80th birthday? I thought why don't we just stop drinking totally? So I stopped totally. From one day to the next I don't really need to drink. So I now love flavored seltzers and I probably spend more on those than I did on vodka. And I stopped smoking 62 years ago, when my younger daughter was born.
Speaker 1:I remember having a conversation with myself it was the year before it caused cancer. This is stupid, jim. Why do you do this? You know it's going to be bad for you. You don't know, you don't want your baby girls to smoke. And I put it out and I never smoked again, from two pack a day to nothing. I'm one of those. I can make a decision and once I've told myself that's what you're going to do, that's what you do, there's no discussing it. You're not going to fall back and try it again. I laugh. In the world that we live in now, not the world I grew up in, I say I'm the only old white man you know who's never smoked a joint. And I don't care, I don't want to, I don't need to, I'm having more fun than any old white man, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true, that's true.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned you have a 10-year plan. What is your 10-year plan?
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. Well, my 10-year plan is based on the fact that the things I'm working on are not just what I'm going to do today, which is have fun with Natasha and discuss reading and writing the two things I love most. I want to find an agent. I want my original TV series to be produced. That's going to take some time and that series could run for 10 years. I mean, I know how to do it. I want to have a film. I'd love to see a feature film. I've hired a PR firm that I'm starting to work with this coming month.
Speaker 1:With my new book and public speaking. I'm going to be doing more and more public speaking now. I'm available if somebody wants to pay me to do it. I don't do it for nothing to go out on the stage and wake people up and talk to them. You know I'm not a boring speaker, so all of those things take time. Nothing is well. This will keep me busy for the next week. No, no, no, no, no. I only have 100 pages of my new novel written. It'll probably be a 400-page book.
Speaker 1:And to write fiction when you're writing fiction, you can't be doing all the other stuff. When you're writing fiction, you wear their clothes, you walk in their shoes, you have dinner with them, you talk in their language, you laugh about having sex with them. You go through all of that. I mean they become your life. Their emotions become your emotion. If you're really writing fiction, you know to live in it. I have to do it that way. Nonfiction is just a chat between me and you. All my books sound like almost sound like I wrote them out of my diary.
Speaker 2:So have you ever thought of writing your own memoir?
Speaker 1:What ended up is that the two nonfiction books are very memoirish, because I'm talking, remember, I'm using my age not only as a hook but as a reason for saying you can live longer and you can live productively and you can really like it. You can have a good time doing it. I'm having a better time now, I think, than in my 60s and I was on top of the world. In the 60s I had a villa in Acapulco and I was traveling around the world. I'm really loving what my life is. That's why I'm saying in the new book Loving Longevity, make your next 10 or 20 years your best, Because they can.
Speaker 1:It's up to you, you know nobody else nobody can say well, you're old, so you can't do anything. Hell with that, Don't tell me that that's true.
Speaker 2:Wow. So where can people find your books, Jim?
Speaker 1:Oh fine, thank you. They can go to my website, which is my name. It's James with the initial B for boy, james B Flaherty, f-l-a-h-e-r-t-y dot com, and that is my website and that will introduce you to all four of my books and my point of view and my philosophy. I'm going to be having a new website soon, also that says Loving Longevity with Jim, which is going to be about speaking, public speaking, because I'm doing more and more of that and life is good. I find everything about reading and writing of that and you know, life is good. I find everything about reading and writing is wonderful. I have some wonderful quotes for you. The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage of the man who can't read them.
Speaker 2:Mark Twain yeah, I know that quote.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wonderful, I love one. Oh, I've been reading. Oh, I'm going to a workshop October 12th in Santa Fe for Modern Elder Academy, and the guest host is Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat Pray, love I love her. I've loved her for years and she has a nonfiction book. All you writers out there.
Speaker 2:Big Magic. I love it.
Speaker 1:I've read it twice and I'm reading it right now for the third time because I'm going to have five whole days with Liz oh lucky you.
Speaker 2:I can't wait.
Speaker 1:I've read all of her books. I've been in love with her for years.
Speaker 2:She's amazing. Yeah, she is amazing. Do you? Are you on Substack? She also has a Substack and she's active on Substack where, like there's a lot of writers on Substack, you can also just look at her stuff. Well, this, this has been wonderful, jim.
Speaker 1:So any advice to like, let's say, your top advice to aspiring authors oh, you know, I guess my real advice is to accept every day of your life as a gift. And if you want to do some good writing habits, try my good habit of, for a while, get up in the morning and splash some water in your face and go in and write. Don't open email, but go in and write something. Work for even just 30 minutes, if not an hour, and write a blog. Start writing a blog about your life If you don't have anything else to write. Or make up a story. Make a short story. Say, I walked into the principal's office and my mother was sitting there crying. Then where do you go from there, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 1:Writing is wonderful.
Speaker 2:So this has been amazing, jim, and very inspiring, and you know I'm so inspired by your healthy lifestyle. I mean, I try to work out, but the eating is still there. I mean two meals a day. Maybe I should do that. No bread, where are you located Natasha. Outside of DC, in Rockville, maryland.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, you're not that far. Why don't you come over and visit? I'm in that very pretty part of America where New York, connecticut and Massachusetts all bump into each other the foothills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll take you up on that. I'll be there.
Speaker 1:You would be more than welcome, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, jim. I really enjoyed our chat and will definitely stay in touch. And, for anyone who's listening or watching, thank you for joining us for another episode of Read and Write with Natasha and until we meet again, thank you for tuning in to Read and Write with Natasha. I'm your host, natasha Tynes. If today's episode inspired you in any way, please take the time to review the podcast. Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time, happy reading, happy writing.
