Petwrification: A Health Warning for All Writers

Have you ever suffered from this?

Petwrification / Petwrified (verb) pet-wri-fi-cation

A psychological condition affecting writers, characterised by sudden horror, cognitive paralysis or emotional outbursts. It occurs when:

(1) finding a mistake in previously published work;

(2) discovering a phrase or point of grammar used wrongly for years;

(3) suddenly becoming immobilized on a punctuation issue;

(4) receiving negative feedback or poor reviews; and

(5) when writers have compared themselves to other writers, concluding that they are comparatively deficient.

(Derived from the common word petrify and the Latin petra, meaning rock.)”

If you would like to know more about petwrification and how to avoid it, please visit my guest post at Southern Writers Magazine’s blog: http://southernwritersmagazine.blogspot.com.au (The lack of paragraphs issue is not my doing… I know sometimes WordPress posts have gremlins I can’t get out. This could be a blogger gremlin.)

The image in this post belongs to a clipart set I bought in 1994 or so… I have no idea whose work it is.

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