All my children

My teammate emailed to ask how I felt about the piece I had written for our client. My first thought was: With the changes that were made during the review process, I felt like the copy had become a gondola car for predetermined messages that would not be credible or even interesting. But I didn't say that. Instead, this is what I said in my return email:

A client asked me one time if I felt differently about each speech that I wrote. I told him they were all my children, and I loved them one and all. But for some, I saved to send them to the best schools; and for others, I encouraged them to keep going to baseball practice. For this little piece I just wrote, I hope there's a decent trade school, and maybe somewhere down the line, a job as a draftsman or a teller in a bank. 

My teammate wrote back:

At Version 4, it needs to move out of the house and live somewhere else.

Later we wondered about a project that seemed to have run away from home to join the circus ... and we were pretty much okay with that.