Zhou Youguang, the man who developed the pinyin system of writing for China, died yesterday. He was 111. His obituary mentions that he published 10 books after he turned 100. Encouragement!

Incidentally, in my last post I mentioned sending a proposal to a publisher. He never responded, despite the fact that email makes it easy to send a stock rejection to writers' proposals. Agents frequently do this too. Does that indicate anything about the contempt they have for writers? I think so.