Rather Fascinating

I often see parts of things I've written on other people blogs -- people I don't know and who don't know me. I was just looking at a cut and paste edit of my Alpha Male 18 Lessons on a person's site. They cut out what they didn't like and kept what they did like. Total hatchet job actually.

I suppose as the author I could get all upset about that, but actually it's rather fascinating as you give your words away, it's every interesting to see what people do with them. When I was in school doing my masters' degree in writing (MFA) and we would critique a story, one of the toughest teachers made us do an exercise like that. We had to say where we lost interest, where we got interested and rip the thing apart in that way to show the writer where it worked for the audience and where it did not work.

This type of radical surgery is often very painful but also very helpful. I really like to hear what people think of my stuff and also feel as if it's no longer mine anyway, once I publish it, it belongs to readers and how they interpret it.

The original post did not credit me as the author, but others who commented did know my name and put a link up to the original source. This is a good neighborhood, this Net.