We set up a book tour, and we went to 20 cities to talk to high school editors about honesty and integrity and about not doing drugs.
Along with dozens of other high school editors, I was taking part in a contest sponsored by the Herald to find "Dade County's Best High School Journalist".
The book generated some mixed feelings, Easton Ellis said, but the younger editors in the publishing house championed it, while the "old school" editors said things like, "My God, if we publish a book like this, publishing is over".
Next came Newsday on Long Island, where an old-school editor, Alan Hathaway, took him on despite misgivings about buttoned-down Ivy Leaguers.
He has grand dreams of composing requiems on the death of the American dream, but the baking contests must still be reported, and his fancy prose is licked into shape by a hard-drinking, old-school editor.
In an interview with a Rethinking Schools editor, Alexander, a legal school and civil rights activist who is also African American, explained that the explosion in the prison population and increasingly harsh punishment in schools has had a devastating impact on black children and the black community.
At that time, it really used to irk the old-school editors.
Old-school editors and bloggers with memories of Mr. Mugler's fantastical shows, or the originality of George Michael's 1992 "Too Funky" video, might complain that the new Mugler is lean and unemotional by comparison.
He is considered one of the last great old-school editors, a legend from the days when writers tended to stay put at a publisher rather than jump to a new one with each book, and when editors called all the shots within a publishing house, even if then, as now, they remained largely unknown to the public.
To me, it seems like another pointless battle for old-school editors who have no clue how to get in the whole new media world and are stuck with the old "write-sell" mentality.
