Book Spotlight + Giveaway: Dear Opl by Shelly Sackier
There are three things Opl never expected to do during the eighth grade:
● Start a vendetta against celebrity check Alfie Adams, the “Nude Food Dude”
● Take yoga classes with her grandpa
● Become a famous blogger
But after a year of shrinking down her personality to compensate for the fact that her body’s getting bigger, Opl thinks it’s about time to start speaking up again. What she doesn’t expect is that everyone actually starts to listen…
What is the best advice anyone ever gave you? What is the worst?
Firstly, many thanks Jessica and Tina for having me here. It’s such a treat and your blog is exactly the kind of site that makes me forget I was supposed to start dinner two hours ago.
Now, the best advice I ever received was If you want to be a successful author, marry a publisher.
It was also the worst advice because I have met a bucketload of those folks, and as nice as they all are, many of them are pasty white and have muscle atrophy from doing nothing but sitting at their desks all day and all night long in desperate search of the next great book.
But the runner up best advice would be that which came from my violin teacher: only practice on the days that you eat. Since I believe everything I want to find success with requires practice, it makes perfect sense to realize the art of storytelling falls under that umbrella. My violin teacher said that if you want to develop a high level of ability with anything, then every day you must touch it. And by that he meant spend time with it. He was Japanese and sometimes had a few wonky slips with English. I knew where he was going with it.
The runner up worst advice came from me, specifically on the days when trying to convince myself that food really wasn’t all that important.
Ultimately, I realized there would be no success without the most important ingredient: DESIRE. As long as you can foster the desire to do something, succeeding with it is a piece of cake. Ooh, yum. Cake.
Shelley Sackier is an author and blogger who writes about the everyday ordinary grand slams and gruesome snafus in completing the Herculean task of raising two healthy human beings. Ultimately she hopes to impart the necessary knowledge of how to balance their checkbooks and pay their taxes. Here greatest hope is to discover that parallel universes are a reality, and that somewhere she is living a life where her children have agreed to occasionally make eye contact with her. They live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
You can read more of her work, illustrated by Robin Gott, at Peakperspective.com
