The best laid plans, etc. There I was, all set to have a good old rant about the guff spouted by arts organisations, and along comes something from an arts organisation that is actually useful and to the point. My guff-detector was rendered silent.
Honestly. I was sent some info about a project or three by an organisation called Hi-Arts (Hi = Highlands & Islands - as in "of Scotland") and found myself quickly shunted onto their website, from which I seamlessly garnered some crystalline and - pause for astonishment: after all, this is public money we're talking about and usually that means it's headed drainwards - practical resources for writers. Not a whiff of waffle.
Depending on who you are, you will have different needs and interests, but surely all of you fall into one or more of these categories:
- You want to know how to write a great covering letter and synopsis and you'd like a leading agent (Jenny Brown) to tell you how.
- You're a Scottish author interested in having a FREE, anonymous and professional critique of your WIP. (Are you still there? I know, it's hard to take in without hitting your head on the ceiling. But you do have to be Scottishish ...)
- You're trying to break into the children's writing world and want some fab advice from leading literary agents and general founts of all knowledge of the genre, Fraser Ross Associates.
- You are a writer of any sort and want to make sure that you're not littering your writing with pleonasms and really want Allan Guthrie to explain it to you.
- You don't know what a pleonasm is ....
It really is quite remarkable. And now I'm going to lie down in a darkened room and work out how I can justify a major rant about arts organisations. I will find a way. They will not defeat me.
And please don't analyse this post for all the pleonasms. This is a blog, not a literary novel, and besides, I'm self-publishing it and it's well-known that self-published work has a tendency to be less rigorously edited than other work ...
