Erin Cummings

At the end of the day, you are solely responsible for your success and your failure. And the sooner you realize that, you accept that, and integrate that into your work ethic, you will start being successful. As long as you blame others for the reason you aren't where you want to be, you will always be a failure.

I think it's true for men and for women, if you are even remotely attractive, people will assume you're just another pretty face and you don't have the work ethic or the talent to put in the time to flesh out a career.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.