Free chapters from Confessions
My book Confessions of a Public Speaker used to have two free chapters on the amazon.com page as a special promotion, but Amazon took them down recently.
Here they are:
Chapter 2 – Attack of the Butterflies & Chapter 3 (PDF)
Scott,
Enjoy the blog much; your first two books as well. Confessions is still on the reading list.
I started to skim Chapter 3 from the link above, and I couldn’t get past the first sentence:
“It’s 7:47 a.m. at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, so early the sun is just starting to rise.”
The sentence so effectively disabled my suspension of disbelief (or my ability to “sink in” to the writing) that I think it must be a (rather persistent) typo.
1) 7:47 (almost 8!) doesn’t seem particularly early, and I am NOT a morning person. Well, certainly I wasn’t before the kids!
2) 7:47 is clearly not so early that “no one except the doorman, the cab driver, and me (would be) awake and outside.”
3) 7:47 is surely long past sunrise!
In fact, a quick google suggests that only on fewer than two dozen days in the past 4 years has sunrise in SF occurred so late as 7:30, and not once past 7:37. It is scheduled to happen at 7:40 AM on Nov 6 this year.
Surely, the sentence was meant to begin with something more plausible, like 5:47?
I totally understand and if it took you out, sorry about that. But it’s such a personal and fragile thing this whole suspension of disbelief thing, and sometimes fiction does a better job of suspending disbelief than the truth does.
Here are the verifiable facts:
You are a gentlemen, sir. Very civilized response to a nit-picky/low content comment.