mood: excellent
cooked: spicy chicken & veggie soup, sweet & spicy shrimp pineapple stir-fry, Cajun potatoes
just watched: You Don't Mess with the Zohan

No writing progress today since today's my official day off. I'm still trying to not write at least two days out of a week, unless I absolutely must (translation: contractual obligations, which I don't have at this point). I'm itching to write a scene, but I must calmly wait. Oi…!

Onto to the real meat of today's post —

I've blogged about it before elsewhere, but decided to repost it since I saw another writer misuse the term “pre-published”.

I hope people would just stop using the term “pre-published” to describe their “unpublished” status. So many unpublished writers use it, like it somehow makes them more special or something to call themselves “pre-published”.

Pre-published is a very specific word describing a very specific situation in publishing. Nephele Tempest, a literary agent, explains:

Pre-published implies that an author has sold a book, but it hasn't actually hit the shelves yet.

I don't understand why people think that calling themselves “pre-published” when they're really “unpublished” is affirming and positive.

Do you call your friends on diet “pre-thin”? Do you call your single friends “pre-wives” or “pre-husbands”? Do you call people with cancer or other terminal illnesses “pre-dead”?

Surely not.

Calling yourself pre-published when you're not only makes you sound pretentious, ignorant and/or worse, foolish, like you don't know what the word really means and/or use it anyway to sound “cool”.