My writing, when first born, is a very ugly baby. Seriously. You don’t see the first draft of anything. If you did you would say, “Mercy, Dave, that is a very ugly baby,” to which I would reply, “I know, this is what I tried to tell you in my 15 December blogpost.” But this doesn’t mean no one sees the ugly babies I produce. (Recognizing I’ve exhausted the metaphor I’ll now move on.) 

I have a first reader, a first editor, a collaborator who sniffs out the rotten and ill-wrought in my writing and ensures that I don’t single-handedly wreak creative havoc. She tells me if something is working and she tells me if it’s not. She knows what bad writing looks like and ensures that whatever leaves my desk––correspondence, reviews, novels, and, yes, blogposts—are of a quality that will avoid both my embarrassment and reader regret.

She has been doing this for twenty years. She’s read more bad writing than an adjunct community college composition professor. And she always does it willingly and thoughtfully. She has turned it into a labor of love. Thank you to my wife, CKM, for her support on and off the page. My work would have self-detonated long, long ago were she not looking over my shoulder. Thank her, dear reader; she is doing you a great deal of good.