I left university with a good degree in English Literature, but no sense of what I wanted to do. Over the next six years, I was treading water, just trying to earn an income. I tried journalism, but I didn't think I was any good, then finance, which I hated. Finally, I got a job as a rights assistant at a famous publisher. I loved working with books, although the job that I did was dull.

    I had enough savings to take a year off work, and I decided to try to satisfy a deep-down wish to write a novel. Attending a Novel Writing MA course gave me the structure I needed to write my first 55,000 words.

    It takes confidence to make a new start — there's a dark period in-between where you're neither one thing nor the other. You're out for dinner and people ask what you do, and you're too ashamed to say, “Well, I'm writing a novel, but I'm not quite sure if I'm going to get there.” My confidence dived. Believing my novel could not be published ,

    I put it aside.

    Then I met an agent（代理商）who said I should send my novel out to agents. So, I did and, to my surprise, got some wonderful feedback. I felt a little hope that I might actually become a published writer and, after signing with an agent, I finished the second half of the novel.

    The next problem was finding a publisher. After two-and-a-half years of no income, just waiting and wondering, a publisher offered me a book deal — that publisher turned out to be the one I once worked for.

    It feels like an unbelievable stroke of luck — of fate, really. When you set out to do something different, there's no end in sight, so to find myself in a position where I now have my own name on a contract of the publisher — to be a published writer — is unbelievably rewarding.

    Moksh Jawa, 16, a student at Washington High School in the US, has already become a legend(传奇) among students. “Why not?” might be his favorite question to ask.

    As a seventh-grader, he taught himself coding(编程) by studying on the Internet.

    As a high school freshman, he passed the AP Computer Science A exam with a 5, the highest score possible.

    As a sophomore (高中二年级学生), he developed his own online course and helped his classmates get through it because his high school didn't teach coding.

    Everything he did came from his own interest. His father sent him a link to Codeacademy, an online coding training program, in middle school. He learned a programming(编程) language all by himself after signing up to the website.

    “I just fell in love with computer science,”Jawa said. Along the way, he lit a fire of curiosity and passion among classmates to learn coding too.

    “All of my friends, especially the girls, were really, really afraid of computer science,” he said. But the subject and exam weren't things to be feared, he said, “Computer science is all about logic(逻辑), not about how smart you are. ”

    To make his knowledge available online, Jawa set about creating his own online course, with easy-to-follow lessons. He included quizzes and tests too.

    The course has so far attracted 3, 200 students across the US and in 120 countries and regions, including China, Ukraine and Algeria.  It shows, Jawa said, the huge need for coding lessons.

    When video lecturing, “I deliver it like I'm talking from one high school student to another,”Jawa said. “It's always great to make it as clear and fun as possible, and to try to keep my voice as energetic as possible. ”

    He also does that, when teaching members of the computer science club he founded at his high school.

    “His tutorials(辅导) were great, ”said Taj Shaik, the club's co-president, who took the whole course last year. “I'm definitely one of the early adopters(使用者) of Moksh. ”

    “He's pretty amazing, ”said Bob Moran, principal of Washington High School, who saw him lead the club. “He was just a fantastic teacher—clear, organized and entertaining. When a student got the right answer, he would throw him a candy. ”

    God has a way of allowing us to be in the right place at the right time.

    I was walking down a dark street late one evening when I heard screams coming from behind a clump of bushes (灌木). Alarmed, I slowed down to listen and soon realized that what I was hearing was the unmistakable sounds of a struggle: mad fighting and tearing of clothes.

    Only yards from where I stood a girl was being attacked. Should I get involved? I was worried about my own safety, and regretted having suddenly decided to take a new route home that night. What if I became another victim? Shouldn't I just run to the nearest phone and call the police?

    The girl's cries were growing weaker. I knew I had to act at once. How could I walk away from this? I finally made up my mind. I could not turn my back on the fate of this unknown girl, even if it meant risking my own life.

    I am not a brave man, nor am I physically strong. I didn't know where I got the courage and strength, but once I had decided to help the girl, I became strangely different. I ran behind the bushes and pulled the attacker off the girl. Struggling, we fell to the ground, where we wrestled for a few minutes until the attacker jumped up and escaped.

    Out of breath, I stood up and approached the girl, who was behind a tree, sobbing. Not wanting to frighten her further, I at first spoke to her from a distance. "It's okay," I said softly. "The man has run away. You're safe now." There was a long pause and then I heard the words, spoken in wonder, in amazement. "Dad, is that you?" And then, from behind the tree, out stepped my youngest daughter, Katherine.

    I remember little of the journey which started so early in the morning. I only know that the day seemed extremely long, and that we appeared to travel over hundreds of miles. Calmed by the sound of the coach wheels, I fell asleep. But I had not slept long when the coach stopped, the door was opened, and I saw a servant standing there.

    "Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?" she asked. I answered "Yes," and was then lifted out. My trunk handed down, the coach instantly drove away. I looked about me. I could see a house with many windows. There were lights burning in some of them. We went up a wide pebbly path, splashing wet, and were admitted at a door. Then the servant led me through a passage into a room where she left me. I stood and warmed my frozen fingers at the fire and looked around. There was no candle, but the light from the fire showed papered walls, a carpet, curtains and gleaming furniture. Then the door opened, and a tall lady with dark hair, dark eyes entered followed by another who looked younger. "The child is very young to be sent alone," said she, putting her candle down on the table. She looked at me for a minute or two and then added, "She had better go to bed soon; she looks tired."

    Led by the younger lady, Miss Miller, through passage after passage, we came, at last, to a long, wide room filled with the hum of many voices. There were many tables, and seated all round on benches were a large number of girls aged from nine to twenty. Seen in the dim light of the candles, their number appeared above eighty. Each was dressed in a brown old-fashioned dress of cheap material. It was their hour of study.

    Miss Miller signed to me to sit on a bench near the door, then walking up to the top of the long room she cried out "Monitors, collect the lesson-books and put them away!"

    Four tall girls arose and went round, gathered the books and removed them. Miss Miller again ordered, "Monitors, fetch the supper-trays!" The tall girls went out and returned presently, each bearing a tray. Some food and water was in the middle of each tray. The food was handed round and everyone drank from the same mug. When it came to my turn, I drank too, for I was thirsty, but I did not touch the food. From there I was taken to my hard bed where I thankfully fell asleep immediately.

    Being forgiving to yourself and others can protect against stress and the harm it does to mental health, according to a new study in the Journal of Health Psychology.

    Researchers looked at the effects of lifetime stress on a person's mental health, and how more forgiving people got along compared with people who weren't so forgiving. To do this, they asked 148 young adults to fill out questionnaires that assessed their levels of lifetime stress, their tendency to forgive and their mental and physical health.

    No surprise, people with greater exposure to stress had worse mental and physical health. But the researchers also discovered that if people were highly forgiving of both themselves and others, that characteristic alone almost removed the connection between stress and mental illness.

    "It's almost entirely erased—it's zero," says study author Toussaint. "If you don't have forgiving tendencies, you feel the immediate effects of stress in a severe way. You don't have anything to cushion you against that stress."

    How a forgiving personality protects a person from the influence of severe stress is hard to determine. The researchers infer that people who are more forgiving may adopt better skills to deal with stress, or their reaction to major stressors(压力源)may be slow.

    Though more research is needed to fully understand the benefits of being more forgiving, Toussaint believes"100％"that forgiveness can be learned. His own previous research has shown that saying a short prayer on forgiveness can help people take the edge off. "I think most people want to feel good and forgiveness offers you the opportunity to do that," he says.

    When I was young, I read many kinds of books, including fairy tales. Most of the books described heroes who were handsome and heroines who were beautiful. So, I believed I had to be beautiful if I wanted to become a great person.

    As I grew up, I began to realize outer beauty was not so important to make someone good. I remember a friend of mine, Janie, who was so beautiful that every classmate wanted to talk with her, but she was very arrogant(傲慢的).

    She believed that she could do everything she wanted because she was so beautiful, but she lost friends one by one. My poor friend! But she learned a good lesson: inner beauty is more important than outer beauty. After she learned that, she changed her attitude and made friends again.

    Whenever I see TV advertisements, I feel that these things make us believe beauty is very important—especially physical attractiveness. Although we say that inner beauty is more valuable, we often look to plastic surgery to make us more beautiful. There seems to be a boom(流行) in plastic surgery. It is surprising to realize the number of people who try it is increasing day by day.

    We know good-looking guys usually get higher scores on job interviews. So, what is real beauty? I want to say that inner beauty is the real one because if someone has beauty in his soul, he looks like a really beautiful person.

    The beauty looked at with eyes doesn't last forever. Instead of concentrating on outer beauty, we should concentrate on inner beauty. The point is that inner beauty is more important than outer beauty. So, if we make the effort to make our minds beautiful, we'll be happier.