Time to reveal a secret...and make a point.

So, in case you missed out, I made an announcement yesterday. In March (provided no unseen obstacles arise) I will begin a series of courses to become a certified copy editor. The course series is offered by UCSD (University of California in San Diego) and has some very nice write ups as I did my research to select the school I would be attending. 

So why now? Some of you may be asking. Well, I will put it like this: just because a person knows the basics of how to work on your car does not make him or her a mechanic. I have been editing for several years...and I can CALL myself an editor. However, no matter how I look at it, I am really just a guy who knows enough to get by. I want to be a professional, and that means that I need to have the education beyond my Associate's Degree and a few select courses in writing and basic English sentence structure. I am never happy with settling for "just good enough".

The indie scene is constantly under fire for shoddy material. There are hundreds of people out there who call themselves editors, and some of them are pretty good. However, just because I shimmy and shake while my music is playing...that does NOT make me a dancer. People have gotten comfortable with claiming things and giving themselves titles. Maybe that has something to do with how everybody gets a "participant" trophy these days. It has fallen out of fashion to say that somebody failed. The reality is that we all fail...perhaps daily. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being okay to say so. And Heaven forbid if we call somebody on being wrong. Well, then we are just being mean. Everything is sugar coated because we don't want to hurt another person's feelings. I got news for you, not everybody deserves a trophy. Being good at something takes work, you don't get to simply speak it into existence.

So, wish me luck.