The Value of No

By Marjie Alonso

I’m taking a course on how to get pieces published. I’m doing this because the longer I’m a full-time writer, the less I write. Though I claim no expertise, this seems bad. I recognize I have a problem to solve.

In my previous life I was an expert in animal behavior, and in that world we understood something called a rate of reinforcement. This refers to the number of rewards per a given unit of time, usually minutes, or even seconds.

When training a dog to sniff out...