Long time no blog, blog!

I guess I should begin with the proverbial "Long time no see (in this case, blog)" thing. Long time no blog!

I've learned a lot of things from work, and I now consider the Chicago Manual of Style my work bible. Apparently, some of the things they taught at school are wrong. No offense to my very amazing English teachers. For one thing, you can start a sentence with a conjunction and end it with a preposition. It sounds a little awkward, yes, but it is apparently grammatically acceptable. Chicago says so himself.

Punctuation marks are always the least concern of any writer but for us editors, it's one of the biggest deals. God, the rules about punctuation! I never knew there was such a thing as a comma splice and that periods have to be inside quotation marks. Headaches are inevitable when you read about all these rules, but it's actually fun learning them. I think that by editing, I'll become a better writer because you are paid to see the mistakes of others, obligated to correct them, and you have no choice but to learn from them. And learned a lot I did.

I don't want to mention it, but half of the manuscripts we edit suck. Not just the mediocre kind of suck, but the suck that means "you can't write for crying out loud!" or "you're wasting money trying to get this piece of shit published--why don't you just donate it to a hunger charity." That sounds cruel but it's the truth! I can't count how many manuscripts I've read that triggered me to curse out loud. But I like it when I stumble on the good ones. Needs a bit tweaking here and there but the writing is good and the plot is worth reading.

All in all, I like my job. I'm still on training so I haven't touched any official manuscripts for now. I've had pretty good scores, so I'm pretty excited about live work. On top of that, I got my first paycheck. Wasn't that much but enough to get me by and pay the rent. :-)

Coming around the things outside work, I'd rather keep my fingers silent. First because I don't like how it makes me really happy and self-conscious at the same time. I've never felt this close to a possibility that sometimes, I just let myself be taken away by the moment. And when the moment ends and I realize that it's a long-shot for him to ever see me that way, I write poems as usual and distract myself by sourgraping.

My life's a bit routine right now but I am losing weight so I'm happy about that. I'm also glad I got to write here again. So long, blog!