Literary Midwives

(The November end-of-the-month* post on writing & blogging.)

I would like to end National Gratitude Month with a shout out to the members of my writing group. They have been with the blog from the beginning. Obviously, they were better able to help editing the monthly posts [Back to Eventing, BtRiding]. Although I had to send the daily posts into the wide world without supervision, they still gave help with formatting suggestions, post ideas, and a K in the P when I got all mopey about the work. In addition to reading my blog posts, I asked these long-suffering souls to read my commercial essays.

From this experience I learned two things:

Criticism can feel great. The thing about writing for pay is that, at a minimum, the submitted copy needs to be good enough to please the editor. Ideally, the text is so breathtaking that these editors line up at the door to shower MORE assignments at you. So, I had an extremely vested interested in making 500 words sparkle to the best of their ability. When one of the group said ‘This title sucks’ (I think she expressed it more nicely but that was the gist), I thought, ‘She’s right & I know how to fix it. Terrific.’

Compromise is not evil. The members of my writing group are intelligent but horse ignorant. I thought I would have to balance explaining horse terms with boring the intended horse magazine audience. Not so. First, I was usually able to eliminate the jargon by adding or changing only a few words. Second & even more surprising, the changes made the text better for the horse audience as well. Wasn’t expecting that.

Thank you, Ladies. You know who you are.

Who do you need to thank?

Blogging Posts
*This month ends early. The real eom is a Foto Friday & I have plans for the 29th.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gratuitous Kitten Pic