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21 Days, or 200, whatever it takes, to a Bigger Vocabulary - Day 8
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Today, you are invited to enjoy a pabulum of goodies sure to make any palaverist salivate. We will feast our brains on anatomy-speak, á la Gooblink. Following is a selection of words that put "names" to those parts of the body you hitherto articulated as "thingy," or "doohickey."
Like, that stringy muscle under the tongue which keeps it inside your mouth...most of us, anyway. I don't think Gene Simmons was born with one. That little flap is called a frenulum, pronounced fren-yoo-lum.
Or, have you ever wanted to warn a friend that she has a dried flake of something dangling just inside her nose off that skinny bone separating her nostrils? And it's just fluttering there, with each inhale and exhale? Well, that piece of cartilage is called a vomer, pronounced vawm-er. Now you can say, "Ew, Sue, there's something hanging off the left side of your vomer."
How about that flesh covered protrusion between your face and your ear opening? Sometimes if I have an itch deep inside my ear, I can rapidly depress that thingy with my forefinger and the itch goes away. Only, from now on, I don't have to call it a thingy, because I know it is a tragus, pronounced tray-gus.
Now take a look at the palm-side of your hand. See those deep lines at the wrist, caused by flexing your hand? Those are called rasceta, pronounced ra-see-ta.
Okay, same hand. Now look at the back of your hand with your fingers flexed. There's what looks like a web between your index finger and your thumb, right? That's called a purlicue, pronounced: pur-lee-cue.
There you have it! I'm stuffed, aren't you? Now, go work up a sweat playing a lively game of Scrabble!
NaNoWriMo - Whew, I need a cigarette!
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Well, there it is. My big, fat NaNoWriMo Winner button!
I clocked in around 5:30 PM on November 30th with a total word count of 50,687. The book is titled Eva and is about...well, it's kinda hard to explain what it's about because there are really two separate stories going on at the same time and I haven't formulated a synopsis.
The inspiration for Eva was a missing persons case that made the news back when I lived in the U.P. in the 80's (Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in case you're unfamiliar with The U.P.). My intent was to write a mystery/suspense fictional piece based on that case, but a few thousand words into it, the thing morphed to encompass Native American spiritualism and magical realism. In the end, it bears no resemblance at all to the story that inspired it.
I joked that my book shares certain qualities with all great literature: it has a beginning, middle and an end. That's pretty much where the similarities stop.
50,000+ words in a month did not yield, for me, great - nay, even good, writing. What it did yield was the bones of a novel, or two. I've also fallen back in love with the process of writing. I'm more in tune with the world around me. Heck, I've even started carrying around my spiral bound pack of index cards so I can jot down ideas, sights, smells and dialogue stolen through eavesdropping.
This manuscript will be put to rest for a while. I have a bit of research to do to add flesh to some areas, and there are other pieces that will be carved out completely. In the meantime, I'm starting on my next novel, which is a YA Fantasy book I've been contemplating for some time.
Who knows, though? Give these characters an inch and they'll take a mile. Pretty soon, you might not know where you're headed.
NaNo - Final Hours
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46, 042
I KNOW I can, I KNOW I can...
NaNo - Day 28
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40,883.
Betcha thought I dropped out, eh?
It's okay, I had my moment of doubt, too. I rolled into Thanksgiving week under 27,000 words, knowing that I'd not likely get much writing done over our trip to Florida. We headed out of town last Sunday; me armed with the AlphaSmart Neo and my novel on a USB flash drive. I managed to squeak out a couple thousand words during the trip, but found it hard to get in the groove.
When I woke this morning and calculated that winning NaNo was going to take more than 20,000 words over the next three days, the fight-or-flight instinct set in and I got down to typing.
I'm ready to call it a night, but feel confident that I'll hit the 50,000 word goal by midnight November 30th. I do have until midnight, right?
Okay, so that's 10,000 words less than my personal 60,000 word goal, but, that's been the story of my life - whatever it takes to get by.
I'll work on behavior modification once NaNo is over.
Thank you for hanging on with me for the ride!
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