PG is still around, taking the occasional breath and unable to stop being a smarty-pants when he makes blog posts about traditional publishing in all of its multi-faceted shortcomings.
Over the past several days, Casa PG has been invaded by a fast-moving flock of small offspring who are unable to prevent themselves from being irresistibly cute and displaying the exceptional intelligence they inherited from Mrs. PG.
PG hopes one and all had an enjoyable Christmas or other holiday of their choice. Extended exposure to cute offspring may stun PG’s sarcasm gene for a bit, but it will soon be pricked to attention by something stupid a publisher says or does.
And agents! How could PG forget about the schoolmarmish Miss Mannersessesses of the publishing world – dot this i just so and cross that t you missed crossing, keep your hands on your lap and your knees together and don’t forget to say pretty please whenever you disturb my professional slumbers with a phone call or letter. (Remember, no emails! Letters are required and must be in block printed form with absolutely no cursive allowed!!)
Leaving aside that the OP misrepresents the underlying material — it’s not the math that privileges whites, it’s the (inept) ordinary means of teaching high school math that privileges whites, and it’s really hard to disagree with the latter† — the OP just doesn’t add up.
† Just consider, for the moment, the abstractions behind (a) story problems and (b) the methods and metrics of judging competence.
A post captioned “Proof of Life” immediately before a post describing a nonagenarian editor’s wait for an octagenerian’s manuscript is just a little bit too much. Even for the holiday season.
Or maybe it’s the eggnog.
The nona’s and the octa’s are a good metaphor for a great deal about traditional publishing, C.
I don’t believe in yesterday for some categories of “value-adders.”
It reminds me of a very popular t-shirt/cartoon from a few decades back. Two vultures sit on a tree limb in the desert, watching a cowboy crawl toward a water hole; one says to the other, “Patience my a** — I’m gonna kill something!”
In the world of commercial publishing, however, it’s not a cowboy crawling toward a water hole, but a shabby-genteel trust-fund kid (with a humanities degree from Amherst†) playing Russian Roulette. Same basic result, however…
† One can graduate from Amherst without taking any post-high-school math or laboratory science, because they’re special and 18-year-old students know what they want and need from the future and won’t ever have to change their minds.
Some believe math competency is evil:
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=10005
Amherst grads are just being ahead of the curve.
I figured that the radio silence was due to something akin to a Munchkin invasion. A grandparent should always take the time to enjoy the brief clips of the epic movie that the parents get to see in full.
Don’t worry about your wit being eroded, either. Judging by the next two posts, it has just been recharging.
There is a balance between altering an author’s voice – and interfering with an author’s voice to make something unmarketable palatable to a publisher.
Agenting must be a frustrating profession – do agents wish they could be creators?