Showing results by narrator "Rachel Lloyd" in All Categories

Imagine a 1980s world of sumptuous hotel rooms, restaurants, New York City penthouses, and the powerful men who move easily between these pinnacles of luxury. They are music producers, rock stars, writers, and restaurateurs. They are household names like Billy Joel, Art Garfunkel, Eric Clapton, and Sting. And yet, each man has an entire aspect to his life that he doesn’t talk about publicly—his depression, his rocky marriage, his feelings of shame and failure, his private loss of faith. And now: The phone rings. Imagine the woman who has each of these men at her beck and call.

In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron: 100 nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe.

Where do the best ideas come from? How do you stay motivated? What does it take to become a published author? And how do you actually make money from your writing? For over five years the hosts of Always Take Notes podcast have posed their nosiest questions to some of the world's greatest writers. The result is a compendium of frank and frequently entertaining guidance for living a creative life. From the early failures that shaped them to the daily challenges of writing and the habits that keep them on track, literary luminaries offer guidance to inspire.