on Front Edge Publishing:

If we spend this much time on every chapter, we’ll never finish this book!” That’s what Victor Begg told me one morning in the spring of 2018 as we had just spent several weeks in a back-and-forth email dialogue about the opening chapter of his 2019 book, Our Muslim Neighbours.

“Victor, veteran writers and editors expect to spend about as much time on the opening and the closing of a project than they do on all the rest of the work,” I told him. After more than four decades as a journalist, that assumption is baked into my bones. I hadn’t stopped to consider that I should explain the importance of this focus on the opening and closing to first-time authors.

So, let me explain …