Thank you so much, Apprentice House Press

As Bad Advice approaches formal publication May 1, I want to show gratitude to Apprentice House Press, my publisher at Loyola University Maryland. Apprentice House Press comes out of Loyola's Communication Department, which offers courses for students interested in book publishing. It is, I believe, the only student-operated publishing house in the country.

Two of those students, Annabelle Finagin and Dominika Ortonowski, worked on bringing the book to publication during the academic year, even in the tumultuous current semester. My gratitude to them is profound, and I hope that Apprentice House Press helps propel them into careers.

I am also deeply grateful to Kevin Atticks, the faculty member who oversees Apprentice House, and who has now consented to publish me twice, despite having endured the trauma of being a student in my first editing class at Loyola.

And now for a brief and crass commercial announcement: Both Bad Advice and my previous book, The Old Editor Says, are available online from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, in print and electronic forms. They are short, but cheap.

 

You weren't just misled, you were had

There are two stages in becoming a writer. First comes the learning. Then comes the unlearning.

I spent years coming up through the ranks as an editor mastering grammar and usage, conventions and arcane style rules. Reading and encounters with fellow editors enlarged my understanding to recognize that my colleagues and I had wasted considerable time on mistaken or outdated strictures.

For the past couple of decades I have been campaigning against shibboleths and superstitions, even having modest success in getting editors of the Associated Press Stylebook to scrape some of the barnacles off its hull.

It’s not just schoolrooms and stylebooks tendering nonsense to the impressionable. Look at the internet. Pick a random post advising against using the passive voice and you are apt to encounter appalling ignorance—people who can’t tell the difference between the passive and the intransitive, or who simply say never to use any form of to be.

Readers of my blog posts started sending links about writing in general as well as grammar and usage, and there was another realm of unsound admonitions to discover with a wild surmise, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.

Emboldened by the success of The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing, which since its publication seven years ago has sold dozens of copies, I set out to expose arrant nonsense, oversimplification, and crackpot edicts.

The result, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, is being published May 1 by Apprentice House at Loyola University Maryland.

It will be available for a modest sum at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com in both print and online versions. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627202943/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=yodotsa-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=c38c7728bb13076788f767fff044beb0&creativeASIN=1627202943

In the shadow of mortality

Over the years, I have worked nights, weekends, and holidays at the newspaper, and Kathleen has worked days and weekends at the church. In recent years, on the few days off we have in common, we have taken to sharing a bottle of prosecco or a couple of Manhattans on the front porch, talking quietly about the day and watching the sun go down.

Now, as we are isolated by the coronavirus pandemic, those late afternoons have taken on a new flavor.

Our children are isolated and our constant concern. Kathleen's parents are isolated at their retirement home and also our concern. Our other relatives are our concern. And though we take precautions, staying at home generally and going out with the masks Kathleen has sewn for us, we know the hazards. it's quite possible that either of us will contract the ccoronavirus. It's possible that we will not display any symptoms and it will all be over. It's possible that one of us will develop symptoms and be dead within five days with lungs full of fluid.

We know how many have suffered already.

That makes those evenings on the porch, which I mark with posts and photos on Facebook and Twitter, not a display of our indulgences, but a gesture of defiance.

In the face of this terrible threat, we will celebrate our time together, enjoy our company with the marks of domestic routines and the celebration of commonplace shared pleasures, shared with our community of friends and acquaintances.

This is what we have. This is what we can do.