There's a prayer my grandmother used to say. I don't remember it very well, but she mentioned a series of bad things adding the necessary "deliver us, Oh Lord".
It goes something like this: "From pestilence, famine, and war, deliver us, O Lord." (and it goes on and on).
My father, who is a very practical man, uses to add "From the obliging, deliver us, Oh, Lord."
Could it be possible that you get too much help, up to the point it becomes useless and even hindering, that you ask our Lord to deliver us from the too obliging folk?
I think it could because it'd just happened to me.
I published 276 words as chapter 1 to my next novel--just a teaser--and a very kind TNBW reviewer rewrote every paragraph of it. No kiddin', every paragraph! According to the reviewer, they spit out some ideas for restructuring and giving my story more colour (well, they actually wrote "color", but since I learned English in the UK I say "colour"). Spit out? They vomited a whole new story! More colour? It now looks like Pantone catalogue!
So, my question is: could it be possible that I’ve just received too much help? I know my English permanently needs improvement, that I never get the prepositions right, that I write in black and white, and that some of my stories only make sense only if you read them backward, but what this reviewer did is simply useless. I was thinking of asking the reviewer to write the story instead of me, but then I thought I would probably sound sarcastic, impolite--in the end, that reviewer was trying to help me improving my troglodyte English--so and decided better not to do it.
Kiss,
Gacela
I don't mind the occasional reworked sentence or reordered sentence. Sometimes, it sounds better. But if they are going to rewrite the whole thing until it doesn't sound like me anymore, why read it? They obviously didn't find it interesting.
But maybe that's me.
