Happy Spring, dear readers!
Spring has sprung! The onions, peas, spinach, kale, and radish are planted and waiting for the onion snow to give the ground the last chill before sprouting. My pride and joy, the heirloom tomatoes are repotted into pots from sprout-cups, and the Cinderella pumpkins burst through the potting soil and await Mother’s Day to transfer outside. Everything is ready and done leaving me time to scour writing news.
I await news about my submission to the 2025 Bethlehem Writers Roundtable Short Story awards—they’ve extended the deadline to April 30th. I’m happy to have my submission sent ahead. I notice there is a writer’s conference nearby on April 19, 2025, at Hughes Library in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. The 2025 Pocono Writers Conference promises a day-long free workshop for writers of all levels hosted by Pocono’s Liars Club. There’s one speaker who I’m very interested in hearing about book covers. I want to self-publish a collection of all the short stories I’ve written, and the book needs a fabulous cover.
After researching more on this topic, Jason Heuer, an Associate Art Director for Simon and Shuster, gives some incredible tips on this webinar. There is a download extension, but it’s easily deleted. However, there is much more to learn within the site. Once you are in the webinar table of condense, there’s another class about learning to pitch. If I can get an editor to accept my collection, they can create the cover!
Learning something new is akin to my garden in spring, continued growth strong and true.
Happy writing!
Betty Wryte-Goode
Mixed-up Words
Compliment and Complement
It’s so nice to receive a compliment, isn’t it? Or is it a complement that we enjoy? Well, it depends . . .
A compliment is defined as an expression of admiration or respect, such as “I really like the way you’re wearing your hair.” A common response might be, “Thank you for the compliment.”
But a complement, spelled with an “e,” might also be something we appreciate. Its most common usage is when referring to some thing (not something someone says) that completes, improves, or perfects something else. For instance, “His steady, grounded personality perfectly complemented her unpredictable nature.”
The difference between them relies solely on whether the vowel near the middle is an “i” or an “e”. A memory aid might be that both complement and complete start with the same first six letters–including that pesky “e.”
Putting them together, we might say:
After complementing the navy blazer and white blouse with a red scarf, she received many compliments.