Words

Recently, I was hornswoggled coerced invited to play Words With Friends, which, if you haven't heard of it, is an on-line Scrabble game, where you play against another opponent. As time sucks go, it probably has slightly more redeeming value than Angry Birds.

I also subscribe to the "Word of the Day" from Dictionary.com, and I get a random vocabulary word in my email each day. I post these to my Facebook wall, and some of my readers over there have fun coming up with alternative definitions.

Now, knowing obscure words might help when you're playing Scrabble. (Especially if you're savvy enough to understand the strategy of using all those bonus scoring spots on the board—I'm not.) And what about knowing the meaning of those Words of the Day?

Editing - Who's on the Page?

Thanks to Karla for her inspiring post yesterday.

Monday afternoon, I got the first edits for the second of my short stories for the upcoming anthology. Publication has been delayed well over a year, so I wanted to try to get them finished before I left for a visit to my parents in LA on Thursday morning, and hoped the edits wouldn't be extensive. The story is only about 9,000 words, so it's nothing like having to turn around edits for a novel.

I found that the editor didn't ask for any revisions, so all I had to deal with was either agreeing or disagreeing with her changes. For the most part, they were technical or style things. Dashes, commas, and some differences in dialogue tagging. Nothing major and nothing I didn't agree with.

But (there's always a but, right?) She did change a few words, and I really didn't agree with them. Really, really didn't agree. And, if you follow my Facebook page, you might have seen some of the discussion yesterday.

The story is a police procedural, told in first person by a seasoned homicide detective. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I researched all my cop stuff for all my books, and I talked to a variety of law enforcement officers. One of my first crit partners had been married to a cop for 20 years. I even had a cop read my story, and after making a few suggestions as to procedure, he proclaimed it "right."

So, this is my opening paragraph:

Reading Like A Writer

Before I start: Our Realtor called and said he wants to hold an Open House both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. In addition, there's another DUI stop that starts Saturday night and runs through about 4 AM Sunday. Looks like it'll be a busy weekend. And a lot of prep work beforehand.

On Monday, we'll be celebrating our anniversary with "Victoria & Albert" at the Grand Floridian.

Back on topic: Reading like a writer. Once you start learning the craft of writing, the entire reading experience changes. All of a sudden (a phrase one of my editors did NOT like), you start noticing things like speaker tags. Point of view. And word usage. Sometimes they'll clunk; sometimes they'll trigger an, "I've got to borrow that one," moment. Sometimes both.

Keep Reading...

One author seems to love the phrase "blew out a sigh." Or there's the dialogue tag that says, "Mary said to John," and then "John said to Mary." In a crowded scene, I can see where that comes in handy. I've used it myself. But when there are only two people in the scene, it's obvious who each is talking to. After the second time, it starts leaping from the page. And, strangely enough, it seemed to predominate in only one or two chapters, as if the author meant to change it but forgot. Was there another person in the scene in an earlier draft? Curious writer-readers want to know.

I also noticed the use of someone who 'angled a chair' to face another character. That was one I thought I might borrow. (Hey, it's a word in the dictionary, so it's not stealing). Then I noticed a whole bunch of 'angling', which started to be conspicuous. But I did like the word, and went through my manuscript to see if it would be a better word than 'turned.'

I did a Find on "turned" and found far too many of them. Another word to add to my ever-growing checklist. Checking my Synonym Finder yielded a full page of variations on the word, broken down into 44 sub-categories. You'd think a few of them could replace some of my eighty-something 'turneds'.

I didn't find any "angleds" when I searched, but there are a couple of them now. The caution is that when you replace a word with a better one, you're likely to find that you've used it already within a page. Or a paragraph. I don't know why we tend to keep using the same words over and over.

Sometimes, there just aren't any decent synonyms that make sense. Or that don't sound contrived, or like you just looked them up in a Thesaurus. It's important that the word choices match your writing voice as well as the character's. If you have a teen-aged boy locked in a dark basement, he's not going to be looking for a point of egress. So poor vocabulary choices can also slow a read.

Which segues into today's fun. I haven't shared many of my Dictionary.com words of the day in some time. So here's a list of recent words that probably will never make it into anything I'm writing:

Furbelow
Brio
Adumbrate
Daedal
Tergiversation
Oneiric
And here's one from Susan Wiggs, which doesn't mean what you probably think it does
Hootenanny

I've finished (I hope) finding all the "real life" stuff in my manuscript. As far as I can tell, the only one that might require permission is the name of a restaurant chain where I've set a scene. I called their company, and the girl who took my call thought it was 'really cool' that I wanted to use the name in a book. She directed me to their PR firm, and we'll see if I get a response. The passage, taken out of context, might look like there's a problem with the food, although that's definitely not the case. If they don't like it, it'll be a 'coffee shop.'

Tomorrow, I'm finally back to working on my new manuscript. Not only did I finish the Tip Sheet, but I also managed to get a good draft of my contest entry. The challenge: a 7200 word limit for the beginning of a manuscript PLUS a synopsis. The manuscript pages had a perfect ending point at about 7600 words, so that wasn't going to work. The synopsis I'd been using was almost 2000 words. Balancing what to include in each so that the synopsis covered the major plot points, turning points, and GMC, while still leaving enough room for a good chunk of manuscript was an ordeal. I'll look at it again in a day or two, but now, I'm eager to get back to dealing with my newly discovered villain. Once I've got his back story figured out in more detail, and filtered in a few more clues, I can start moving forward.

And don't forget – Homicide – Hussey is back tomorrow. This week: "The Littlest Cop."

Cop Out Monday

What I'm reading: Fault Line, by Barry Eisler

It's a cop-out post today. I've got a cold--nothing really bad, but annoying enough so I spent the weekend doing the bare minimum in the way of household chores, and added nothing new to my manuscript. Instead of coming up with something clever or deep and meaningful for my post today, I dug into my email.

First, some quotes from my Quote of the Day collection:

The opinion you need to trust is your own. I'm not saying that presenting your work to others is a bad idea. I'm saying other people's opinions should not substitute for your own. You can't depend on others to tell you what you've done, or not done. You can't depend on others to make your work harder or feel better about your work. You must learn to depend on yourself. How? By not giving away the responsibility to others. ~Lauren Kessler
The Writer, Aug 2008

Keep Reading...

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once. ~Diana Wynne Jones

It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it. ~Mark Twain

How can you hate the actual writing? What is there to hate about it? How can you hate the magic which makes a paragraph or a sentence or a line of dialogue or a description something in the nature of a new creation? ~Raymond Chandler

Next, some vocabulary words from my Word of the Day collection

pinchbeck \PINCH-bek\, noun, adjective
inanition \in-uh-NISH-uhn\, noun
velleity \veh-LEE-uh-tee; vuh-\, noun
thaumaturgy \THAW-muh-tuhr-jee\, noun

And finally, a clip hubby sent. Yes, it's been around, but it made me laugh out loud, and maybe it'll bring a smile to someone else as well.



And by all means, come back tomorrow. Author Patricia Stoltey is going to talk about Cranky Old Women. One way or another, I think we can all relate.

Fun With Words

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