Having a good relationship with an editor is important for writers, but before you can get to that personal interaction you, as a professional author, must first choose the right publishing house. Your publisher is the entity that will actually produce and negotiate your writer’s contract and also birth your book into the world.
“I believe in you.”
If you want to help me test WordPress.com I would like you to try to add the following link to your Blogroll via the LINKS menu in your WordPress.com admin view:
Please add that link just as it appears. Do not add “www” to the front of “boles.com” and then let me know if it appears in your Blogroll and if you can then edit or delete it from your LINKS Admin view.
Thanks!
Annette Lareau discusses in her fine book, Unequal Childhoods, how parents with money use “Concerted Cultivation” as a weapon to make their kids well-rounded and aggressive in society and to challenge adults and teachers and doctors by “speaking up” when they feel they have been wronged.
You may be lucky enough NOT to know today, September 19, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day where grown people, many of them friends of mine, decide to “talk like a Pirate” all day long for no reason at all other than to be anti-social and, frankly, annoying.
My wacky and wonderful friend Gordon Davidescu is one of the unfortunate few who annually celebrates International Talk Like a Pirate Day and, while I love Gordon a lot, I must pity his want to participate in the “Arrgh Mateys” and “Have ye any them thar gold doubloons on ye, laddie?”
I have never talked like a Pirate.
I will never talk like a Pirate.
I propose today that all the sane people in the world come together for once — and from now on every September 19 — to counter the Pirate Talk Movement with a revolution of our own:
International NEVER Talk Like a Pirate Day!
International Never Talk Like a Pirate Day will restore order and normal talking while removing pegs from our legs and parrots from our shoulders that are hoisted upon petards that are not our own.
All in favor of joining me in this international mission raise your hook and say: “For Aye!”
When I was seven or eight I learned my first cuss word. I grew up in a home where alcohol and smoking and “potty-mouthing” were not allowed until my mother married a second time and her new husband brought two sons into our home.
The rise of credentialism is an onerous and angry philosophy of separation forced upon the “have nots” by the “already haves.” That phony-on-the-surface and irresistible-in-the-depths separation of people by paper is an ominous cloud along the horizon of our educated humanity because this is a separation not by talent or ability or deeds but by theory and strategy and if you doubt it there is a growing diploma trail to prove my point. I have an MFA degree from Columbia University.
An MFA means “Master of Fine Arts.” An MFA differs from an MA degree in two ways. The first is the degree moves beyond theory and into the technical aspects of the art: I can not only describe how colors affect a dramatic presentation I can design and implement them as well. Second, an MFA degree, because of the technical aspect, is considered a “terminal” degree in that, like a PhD, you have reached the end of the road in your trip for knowledge and because you have touched that terminal end you are certified by the system of academe that you are worthy of being hired on a full line tenure track.
At least that’s the way it is supposed to work in theory. In the last five years there has been a sea change in academe as the basic requirements for applying for a tenure track position at a major research university have shifted. Most job announcements used to say “MFA or PhD preferred.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.