In the course of doing research on British novelist Sue Russell, I learned of her having played the piano for a ballet school, scrubbed steps in hospitals, volunteered as a Samaritan for 17 years, and taught English in Indonesia. But what fascinated me most, from a writer’s viewpoint, was discovering Sue knew she wanted to be a writer when she was a young girl. I couldn’t help but smile when I read that by 12 she had a handful of rejection slips. Ahh, to quote another British writer, Jane Austen, the half agonies and half hopes of a writer. Decades later, Sue’s friends put up a challenge.…