CHANGING BLOG ADDRESS

IMPORTANT NOTE TO ALL READERS:

I HAVE MOVED!

I have moved the whole blog to a new address. Please join me over there as no new posts are being added here and I have removed key info from this old version ...


PLEASE GO TO THE NEW ADDRESS:
www.helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com


When you get there, PLEASE rejoin as a "follower" - changing addresses means I lose my 230 lovely friends!



NB also - all comments are intact on the new version.


Wednesday 15 April 2009

ANTI-GUFF RANT POSTPONED BY PLEONASMS


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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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 ...)
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. You don't know what a pleonasm is ....
Links to clear guidelines on all these things are to found here, on a single page. Yes, an arts org that doesn't hide its info deep in the recesses of a labyrinthine website designed to fool anyone with a normal brain and less than four years to find the right page.

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 ...