Angela B. Wade's Blog

“More than two years into a pandemic that has no clear end, the debate over remote work has only intensified. Working from home isn’t possible in many jobs. But for those who have the option, it’s now evident that it is feasible, even beneficial.”

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Error Rates in Editing: What’s Your Save Percentage? (podcast)

Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes has unseated the long-time love of my life, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

Bradbury is an absolute master of words, and I can’t think of anyone who comes even close. Every single sentence is a poem.

“Good editing is invisible. Bad editing is painfully obvious—usually because the editor has, instead of clarifying the author’s intent, attempted to rewrite in the editor’s own style. Editors are there to remove, rearrange, and altogether improve, not to make the writing their own.”

Read more at ACES: The Society for Editing.

When fact-checking (fiction or nonfiction, your document or someone else’s), watch out for restrictive words: always, every, never, only. Inevitably, there will be an outlier.

For example, did you know:

The best thing you can be as a fact-checker is skeptical. If something doesn’t sound quite right, research it using scientific sources (i.e., not Wikipedia), and if you need to make a change to someone else’s document, cite the source(s).

There’s a difference between a diligent pursuit of your goals and sacrificing your well-being for “success.” But that difference can be hard to see sometimes.

In the beginning, burnout often feels like moving in the right direction. You’re chasing your goals. You’re working towards success. Your flame is burning strong and you’re full of energy. The future seems bright.

Read more at Big Self School.

Daniel Slager, CEO and publisher of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis, reported that sales of Braiding Sweetgrass, a seven-year-old title by Robin Kimmerer, are “lifting revenues this year,” noting that the book, which calls for a return to a simpler life, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for trade paper for more than 16 consecutive weeks. Sales in all formats are 400,000 copies.

Overall, April saw a “dramatic slowdown” for Milkweed, Slager said, describing it as “a disappointment but not devastating.” May sales “soared,” he noted, and June is “robust.” He added that he was “moved by how committed [distributor] PGW and Ingram have been, right through the darkest days of the pandemic.”

Read more at Publishers Weekly.

“Why do you think you should be used to this by now? We’re all beginners at this,” Masten told me. “This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s expecting a lot to think we’d be managing this really well.”