To A Mouse
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone]
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry]
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promised joy.
Robert Burns
Now that we’ve gotten a full month of blog writing experience, we’re feeling a little cocky about the whole thing (or perhaps reckless and feckless is more apt) and have decided that it’s time for us to push this sucker to new heights or at least save it from sinking into a quagmire of squishy, uninteresting posts. So, after several seconds of serious discussion, we’ve determined that the best way to achieve our lofty goal of not boring all of you to near-hypnotic states is to hone in on a topic of interest to most of us—writing. We apologize to those of you who don’t give a tossed fig about writing and promise to devote at least one blog a week to a continuation of our ramblings.
But wait, there’s more (try to contain your excitement, and for goodness sake, loosen your grip on that coffee cup). We are not going to merely drone on and on about the craft of writing; no, we are going to talk about different parts of the writing process with a special emphasis on getting published and winning contests.
With our new and improved All About You format, we will have a sort-of, and always open-to-change, schedule, which we will hopefully follow. Of course we all know about plans of mice and men, and just as Burns apologized to his now homeless mouse, we apologize in advance for sometimes skipping away from our plan, but we will try our best to stay on track. Promise.
We want to make our blog a go-to source for writers so we will be adding all kinds of useful links onto the site as well anything else that seems interesting. As to our schedule, Susan will write a weekly post focused on young adult and middle grade fiction, and Beth will write one about literary fiction. Together we will write a weekly post exploring the harrowing path to publishing, both traditional and indie, as well as one weekly post on a topic that strikes our fancy. As an added bonus just for you, Beth will write a weekly grammar hint and a moment of clarity, while Susan will provide an interesting tidbit of trivia or historical fact and try to provide a challenging word or amazing quote of the week.
So, that’s our plan, let’s hope we don’t too often go awry.
