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I can’t quite believe that five years (and a month) have passed since I resigned my position as a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer to begin a new life as a self-employed writer from home. (Please resist the image of me lounging in bathrobe and slippers.) The transition was surprisingly easy, considering I had spent the previous 20-odd years nonstop in one newsroom or another. Part of the reason was that I had a project I was passionate about — my second book, The Longest Trip Home. The day after leaving the Inquirer, I got started, but I soon found that writing from home was full of hazards. If my family was home, I couldn’t focus. If I was home alone, I…couldn’t focus. I felt restless, all too tempted to kill time on emails, Facebook, music and a thousand other distractions.
That’s when I discovered Linderman Library at Lehigh University, about a 15-minute drive from my house. It’s a stately old building that feels like it came straight off a Harry Potter movie set: massive stone walls, soaring turrets, leaded glass windows, oak beams and brass chandeliers. But it had something more: a quiet, focused energy that worked for me.
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