Greetings and Salutations!

Books are my life.

I’m not saying this in the way that other people throw around “music is my life” or “art is my life”– the way that implies life wouldn’t be worth living without these things.

While this is true, I mean this in the very real and not at all figurative sense. You see, I work in publishing. If people didn’t write books (even really crappy ones) I wouldn’t get to do necessary things like eat or make minimum payments on the student loans on which I spent getting a degree in reading books.

Last night as I reserved a copy of the newest Chicago Manual of Style from my favorite local bookstore, I realized it was the first time I’d given my phone number out to anyone other than the Chinese takeout place in ages. I left the store with $50 in signed books that I had no intention of buying five minutes before seeing they were signed copies.

I have a problem: a very serious, very nerdy problem from which I have no hope of recovering. Case in point, I just used a semi-colon in the same sentence in which I refused to end a sentence with a preposition.

Born of my fantastic nerdiness is A Tense Subjunctive, a place for all things bookworms love.

The subjunctive tense is used to “express wishes, commands, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or statements that are contrary to fact at present.” Thank you, Wikipedia. Could there be a better way of describing all the wonderfully beautiful things about life, love and language? Probably not.

And after all, nothing stresses out language students like the subjunctive tense. If I were you? If I was you? Does anyone even know?

My friend suggested I name the blog “ColonP,” after our propensity to use the 😛 emoticon entirely too much. It was so clever! It was brilliant! I was in love! It turned out a quick Google search of “colon p” revealed more information about colon polyps and urinary problems than about punctuation.

For fear of misinterpretation, I quickly made an executive decision to rule out all formal usages of the word “colon,” semi or otherwise.

Welcome to A Tense Subjunctive, dearest nerds and bibliophiles. This page is ugly right now, but it will get better. I promise.