Deborah Pullen

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn." --Anne Frank

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@CityofWS
@JournalNow
@rcraverWSJ
#development
#business

[Richard Craver @rcraverWSJ]

Anchor W-S restaurant location for defunct K&W Cafeterias chain has been purchased for $1.5M by a local commercial real-estate company. Buyer of 13,189-square-foot building at 3300 Healy Drive is Gemcap Development LLC. The seller is Allred Investment. https://t.co/vA15IHobQv

[Richard Craver @rcraverWSJ]

Piedmont Triad International Airport wants to add another innovative manufacturer to portfolio, authority officials said last week. Executive director Kevin Baker said next on recruitment agenda is maker of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
https://t.co/M3HE01dAgn

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@jon_wertheim, thanks for asking @SaraErrani & @VavassoriAndre for #doubles advice 🎾 at @rolandgarros!

@TennisChannel supports club players 👏🏽👏🏽

@PrakashAmritraj
@ShirasLeif
@jamie_murray

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@jamie_murray & @ShirasLeif, you’re helping our #doubles play at home. Keep it up! 🎾

Thanks, @TennisChannel 👏🏽

#tennis
@rolandgarros

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@AlyssaMatesic How encouraging, @AlyssaMatesic 👏🏽

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@ShirasLeif and @paul_annacone are providing expert #doubles insights at @rolandgarros 🎾.

Great match between @K_Siniakova, @TaylorTownsend, Iva Jovic and Arango.

#tennis
@TennisChannel

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

Love the doubles’ strategies you give on @TennisChannel at @rolandgarros, @BrettHaber and @paul_annacone 🎾.

Help the club players out!
#tennis
#doubles

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@TennisChannel, thanks for showing #doubles matches 🎾. We love the commentary (free coaching)! 👏🏽👏🏽

@ShirasLeif
@paul_annacone
@BrettHaber

[Gene A Hoots @a_hoots]

HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE SURVIVORS https://t.co/ITFFINVDC5

[Alyssa Matesic @AlyssaMatesic]

I've interviewed nearly 100 successfully published authors and literary agents over the past four years.

Here's what I always ask them: what's one thing you wish every aspiring author knew sooner?

Here are 9 tough truths about the publishing process that
most writers learn the hard way (so you don't have to).

[Gene A Hoots @a_hoots]

R. J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO: 150 YEARS OF EVOLVING CULTURE CHAPTER VI C: NABISCO BRANDS RENAISSANCE 2000-2017 https://t.co/POxWuPYR2l

[Alyssa Matesic @AlyssaMatesic]

If your novel moves too slow, readers will put it down partway through.

If it moves too fast, readers won't feel connected to your characters or immersed in your scenes.

Whether it's a slow start, a saggy middle, or a rushed ending, pacing is one of the biggest problems I see in manuscripts I edit.

Here are 5 practical steps to nail the perfect pace:

[Alyssa Matesic @AlyssaMatesic]

1️⃣ Time your inciting incident strategically.

The inciting incident is the moment things meaningfully change for your main character — the event that sets the plot in motion.

If it happens too late, readers won't know what the story is building to.

A general rule of thumb is to place the inciting incident within the first 10-15% of your book. But some authors place it in the very first chapter.

There's often excess material in your first chapters that could be cut or condensed to get to the inciting incident faster.

Don't bury the lede.

[Alyssa Matesic @AlyssaMatesic]

4️⃣ Slow down in consequential moments.

If you speed through highly dramatic or emotionally intense scenes, your story will feel rushed and choppy.

In these critical moments:
➡️ Show your POV character's full emotional response
➡️ Unpack all the consequences of what's happening
➡️ Give the reader enough physical description to feel fully immersed in the moment

Lingering in a climactic scene naturally builds anticipation and suspense.

[Richard Craver @rcraverWSJ]

The state has permanently banned a real estate company that traded cash for 40-year rights to sell a home. NC Attorney General's Office said on Monday it has obtained consent judgments permanently barring MV Realty from doing business in North Carolina. https://t.co/KD1gfYcOU9

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@AlyssaMatesic Great marketing strategy, @AlyssaMatesic. “A product to sell” is key.🔑

[National Flash Fiction Day @nationalflashfd]

FlashFlood is open! We’d love to receive your subs 😊 Flashes up to 300 words, pre 2023 prev published considered, reserved spots for debut writers. You have until 23:59 on 25 April: https://t.co/B441Em81NC

[Deborah Pullen @PullenWrtr]

@NovakGOATovic @DjokerNole Reset

[Howard Luks MD @hjluks]

Don’t let your life "narrow."

I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The thing I watch happen to people — more than any injury or surgery — is what I call the narrowing.

Most of my patients have no idea it’s happening. They think it’s just aging. It’s not.

The narrowing is the slow shrinking of what your body allows you to do — or what you assume your body can or should be doing at your age. You used to carry four grocery bags. Now you take two. You used to sit on the floor with the grandkids. Now you sit on the couch. The overhead bin in the airplane? Not anymore.

But... Nobody intentionally decides to narrow their life. Your body quietly loses some capacity, your daily choices adjust to the loss, and within a few years, the smaller version is your new normal. And many of us just normalize these changes.

Patients tell me about the narrowing every single day. They just don’t use that word.
They say, “I can’t do what I used to do.”
They say, “That’s just what happens at my age.”
And they say it as if it’s a fundamental law of physics.

Yes — some decline is real. VO2 max drops. Max heart rate drops. Strength drops. Power drops faster than strength. Proprioception drops. But the unavoidable decline is only a small fraction of what most people are actually losing. The rest, the part that turns a sixty-year-old into a frail seventy-year-old, is not aging. It is disuse.

The cruelest part is that people normalize it. They don’t question it. They talk about capacities they’ve lost as if losing them was scheduled.

Once the narrowing starts, it slowly accelerates on its own. You stop lifting heavy things. Your muscles lose fast-twitch fibers. You get weaker. You lift even less. You lose more. The loss feels like aging. You accept it. The loop tightens, and your world narrows.

VO2 max declines about 10% per decade in sedentary adults. Strength declines slowly starting in the forties. Power declines about twice as fast as strength after fifty. Bone density drops. Balance degrades. Get over it — you still have agency over all of these.

The slope and severity of each of those declines are profoundly modifiable with training. The sedentary decline curves are not the same as the natural human decline curves. They are the untrained decline curves.

Trained adults in their seventies routinely outperform untrained adults in their fifties. The body remains responsive to training well into the seventies and eighties. This is one of the best-established findings in the aging literature. But how many doctors tell their patients about this?

The patients who reverse the narrowing are not the ones with the best genetics, the best knees, or the best circumstances. They are the ones who decided to do something. Something made them stop accepting the losses as inevitable, and they started doing things differently.

What have you already stopped doing? Not what you can’t do, exactly. I'm not talking about old injuries that have ruined a joint, or those of you who have disabilities...

For the rest... the sedentary.... What have you quietly stopped doing over the last five or ten years, without ever making a real decision about it? And more importantly, did your body actually tell you to stop, or did you assume you needed to?

Much of the narrowing in your life right now is reversible. I have watched it happen in thousands of patients. It is not a miracle. It is just the body doing what the body does when you start asking it to do something again. The door you thought had closed is usually still open.

I am not a one-off. I am a sixty-two-year-old who decided not to let my life narrow, and who did the specific work to back up the decision, for long enough that the work is now visible from the outside. You can do this too. At any age, I am likely to be talking to. Start where you are.

In a relatively long post on SubSt, I discussed how my observations shape my training regimen below. This training is largely based on observing thousands of people over the last 25 years.
Link in reply...

[City of Winston-Salem, NC @CityofWS]

⚠️ Northwest Boulevard is closed to through traffic between University Parkway and Underwood Avenue in Winston-Salem on Tuesday, April 7, for repairs to the roadway following an overnight water main break. Work is estimated to be completed by noon today. Avoid the area and plan for alternate routes.