The Story Behind the Story: More Than a Revision

I have been making an effort to reuse blog material in other ways--primarily revising blog posts about books for essays appropriate to submit to a Medium publication. Usually this involves the essay becoming a more sophisticated version or being developed around a different angle. But I recently wrote about Make Believe by Mac Barnett in two very different ways, once here at Original Content and then at Books Are Our Superpower. 

Here at OC, I wrote about hyperbole and what it had to do with the Make Believe blow-up last month. This was part of a recurring feature here on humor writing.

At BAOS, I did more of what I'd call a reader response. This was inspired as I was reading the book when I found that while I couldn't get into the outrage it caused, I also couldn't embrace it the way reviewers and many of the posters I saw on BlueSky were. I found Make Believe to be neither as bad nor as good as others did.

In both cases, I thought I had something new to say about Make Believe, things I hadn't seen before.