Crusoe’s foot

To do this job, your skin has to be thicker than the soles of Robinson Crusoe’s feet.

(Well, and you also need a writer’s ego, the cojones to approach unapproachable people, a finely-honed professional patience to deal with crackpots, a stress junkie who thrives on deadlines, an "appreciation" for late nights and "on-call" and some serious coping mechanisms for dealing with all that. But I digress.)

This morning I got an e-mail from a reader accusing me of "no attribution or fore-mention" and "bad reporting or editing." According to the reader, I used someone’s last name without giving their first name or title in one of my stories.

I re-read the story and, lo and behold, there’s full source attribution in the fourth graph and mention of the source by last name only in the final two graphs. All the reader had to do was, well, read.

I respond to e-mails like this a lot from people I know from interviewing and people who think they know me because they read my stories and have access to my e-mail address. And who think they’re in a position to attack my credibility. When I’m wrong, I admit it.

Most of the time I love getting e-mails, but sometimes being on the defensive can get tiring.

Painting "Julia’s Foot" by Kelly Borsheim courtesy borsheimarts.com