THE BODYGUARD AND THE SHOW DOG is a laugh a minute story in the best Janet Evanovich style. The situations that Natasha finds herself in are hilarious, her attempts to balance her career and her relationship are the makings of an Emmy winning sitcom. Ms. Tillery French's Bodyguard series is one that will have you laughing and cheering Natasha's bid for independence even as you feel complete sympathy for Jonce's quest to keep her safe from herself. A wonderful book for an afternoon read. --Brenda Edde, Romance Junkies The Bodyguard: by Christy T French Opening the cover of a new Christy French book is always an adventure. The dialogue is witty and spicy. The story moves along at a rapid pace, with the action usually unexecpted and at times hilarious. --Barbara Buhrer, Reviewer, Myshelf. Ms. French blends comedy, suspense, personal trauma and hot romance and presents a fine read. And cool characters. Watch out for the Pit and Bigun bodyguard team! Make the effort to find "The Bodyguard". --C. B. Shelly, Reviewer, CataRomance.

INSPIRING AND NOT-SO INSPIRING Authors' Quotes
by Christy French, 2006

Some people collect baseball cards; others shot glasses. Me? I collect something not as tangible, but what I have found can be very uplifting: authors' quotes.

REJECTION/CRITICISM:

"It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are."
- Alice Walker

"I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'"
- Saul Bellow

"This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it "to the editor who can appreciate my work" and it has simply come back stamped "not at this address." Just keep looking for the right address."
- Barbara Kingsolver

"A good many young writers make the mistake of including a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. That is too much of a temptation to the editor."
- Ring Lardner

"Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing."
- Joyce Carol Oates

"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."
- Oliver Herford

EGO:

"No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who had ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted."
- W.H. Auden

"And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages - all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'"
- Doris Lessing

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
- Dorothy Parker

"All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it."
- William Saroyan

"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."
-Samuel Johnson

"An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again."
- Roy Blount, Jr.

WRITING:

"Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."
- Mark Twain

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
- John Steinbeck

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."
- Stephen Leacock

"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
- William Strunk, Jr.

"I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me."
- Anna Quindlen

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
- Cyril Connolly

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."
- Ray Bradbury

"There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call the "breaks." In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait."
- Countee Cullen

"Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush."
- Pete Murphy

"There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast."
- Tennessee Williams

"Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing and it becomes chronic in their sick minds."
- Juvenal

Don't loaf and invite inspiration. Light after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."
- Jack London

"Wear the old coat and buy the new book."
- Austin Phelps

"A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is."
- Flannery O’Connor

"Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words."
- Mark Twain

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
- Jorge Luis Borges

"I write at high speed because boredom is bad for my health."
- Noel Coward

"Writers get to treat their mental illnesses every day."
- Kurt Vonnegut

"My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."
- Elmore Leonard

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
- E. M. Forster

"If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you."
- Florence Litlauer

"The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write."
- Gabriel Fielding

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing."
- Richard North Patterson

"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist, you are learning your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like."
- Phyllis Whitney

"To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."
- Truman Capote

"One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel."
- John Gardner

"Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde (via Bobbi dePorter)

"Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world."
- Tom Clancy

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think."
- Elbert Hubbard

"The best revenge is to write about it."
- Meg Cabot

"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure."
- Henry David Thoreau

"I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances."
- John Steinbeck

"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."
- Robert Benchley

"I try to think of characters who on the surface of their actions are deeply unsympathetic. It's the writer's job to make them sympathetic, in spite of themselves."
- John Irving

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."
- Oscar Wilde

"Starting a novel isn't so different from starting a marriage. The dreams you pin on these people are enormous."
-Ann Patchett

"First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about."
- Bernard Malamud

"You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it's going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children."
-Madeleine L'Engle

"I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live."
- Francoise Sagan

"I have rewritten - often several times - every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers."
- Vladimir Nabokov

"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."
- Irvin S. Cobb

"Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal."
- T. S. Eliot

"He who makes no mistakes, seldom makes anything."
- Isak Dinesen

"I wish I was smart enough to write a book that's hard to read, you know?"
- Jerry Jenkins

Christy Tillery French P.O. Box 297 Heiskell TN 37754 E-mail: readermail@ChristyFrench.Com