As a writer, I have an ongoing love affair with words. I love their poetry and their strength, their abundance and their spareness, their grace and their no-holds-barred impact. I love that they continually surprise me and challenge me. I love painting pictures with them that have the capacity to spark others’ imaginations. And sometimes, I love that others just find better words than I do. 😉
Such was the case recently, when a reviewer at Dark Faerie Tales opened her review of Sins of the Son with this line: Take care, for the war between Heaven and Hell is upon us.
Ooh, I thought when I saw it. And ahh, I thought when I read it again. The line absolutely captivated me. It said so much…so eloquently. Even better, it had the potential to solve a nagging issue with which I’d been struggling for weeks: the dreaded (at least in my case!) press release.
(I don’t know about you, but I am not — and probably never will be — all that great at standing naked on a rooftop shrieking “Hey, world, look at me!” Which, in my opinion, would be the rough equivalent to writing what amounts to a braggart’s note and sending it out to a bunch of strangers who receive several hundred such notes every day. In a word? Ack!!!)
As I have yet to win the lottery (or sell movie rights, ha ha), however, I have no publicist and therefore no choice but to write my own releases. And so I did. Or rather, I tried. And tried, and tried, and tried…and failed. Time after time, first line after first line…no matter what I wrote, it just didn’t sound right. Too pushy, too dull, too weird, too arrogant, too meek — I covered all the toos and then some. And then I found the Dark Faerie Tales review and that single, beautifully crafted line that was, in the famed words of Goldilocks, “Just right.”
With the reviewer’s permission (thank you again, Kiwi!!!), the opening line in the review became the opening line in my press release and just like that, the rest of the words fell into place. Before I knew it, the release was written: simple, catchy, and built on someone else’s words. Someone else’s better words. 🙂
TAKE CARE, FOR THE WAR BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL IS UPON US
…AND IT STARTS IN TORONTO.
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