Great Books of Words

I don't know about you all, but I really do love words. Good Words. Colorful Words. Tasty Words! (Okay, yes, My name is Mrs. Mitty and I am a wordaholic.) I love the way they look, the way they sound and knowing or learning where they came from. I love the way it feels to say them and to know all about them.

Browsing my library, well, my scattered hoards and stashes of books, actually -- to suggest that my books are in some order resembling the tidiness of a library would be a big fat lie, not to mention putting on airs {g} -- I find that a lot of them are about words.

Here's a little sampling:
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Synonyms & Antonyms
Websters New World Thesaurus
Roget's Thesaurus
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable
A 1923 edition of a huge (4" thick with teensy-tinsy print) dictionary with all kinds of good old words in it...
The New International Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary (another big fat one but only about three years old)
And the list goes on.

I suppose it's no big surprise for a writer or a reader to have this kind of stash. I will say the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and the Brewers are my favorites, followed closely by the old, yellowed dictionary. But I'm curious to know if other readers and writers have any really special or unique favorite word-books.

Do you? And if so, what books are they? I'm always on the lookout for new goodies.

Weird Helps

I was reading over the current POV exercise at the forum and thinking I might participate this time. So I took a chunk out of a scene I'm working on, and pasted it into a new document to get it ready for the exercise.

Interesting thing happened. (Well, interesting to *me*, anyway.) I re-read that chunk before I started marking it up to post - and quite easily saw how to fix some clunky phrasings and sentence order problems. Interesting, because I didn't see how to fix them when they were sitting in the original document attached to the other 14,500 words.

So what was that weird mojo? Just that little bit of "white space"? Making an island of those words so that I *couldn't* write anything after or before, thus, not getting distracted by what I wanted to write next? I don't know, but whatever it was, it seems to have made the problems and their solutions pop right out at me. I liked that!

I think I'll file this under "Editing Tips".

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Tracking...
Got a little more done on the same scene today.
The rest, same as it ever was...for the last few days, anyway. [g]
.

Getting Real, Getting Faces, Getting Going

I haven't written much in the last four days due to a boatload of migraines (gone now, thank God!).

Today, I split off my "story bible" from the mondo story file. It was getting too unwieldy. So now my total word count for the story is more accurate. I have about 1300 words in the bible, so those are now subtracted from my progress meter. This fantasy novel really needs one (a bible, that is) - foreign words and places and all are going to require an appendix, too, so, lots of material for a bible.

I did, though, finish something that's fun and kind of important to my forward progress. I've found "faces" for all my MCs (and some needed child and adult faces; Kailia needed three: child, adult, old).

This may seem strange, but I am very visual, and need photos to help me "see" my characters. What I do, after creating the characters and getting to know them, is to do web searches for actors/models/regular-people headshots. When I find one that really strikes me as "Character X", I copy and paste it into my story bible.

Sometimes, having the face even helps me flesh out the characters. Brakkus, for example, even as a child, has a section of hair two-inches wide that's white as snow. And there's a story behind that that I didn't know before I found his picture. [g]

Question: Anybody else do this picture thing, or am I the only weirdo?

Question: Do you use a "bible"? If so, what goes in yours? Enquiring minds want to know. [s]

I'm having a good month, compared to last, with over 2,000 additional words so far, so I want to keep the momentum going and aim for at least 5,000 by the end of the month. (I have some time off next week). I can tell since I haven't been doing my little TRACKING thingo at the end of my posts, that I have let myself slack quite a bit more, so I'm going to re-institute that starting today.

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TRACKING...

Yesterday's Big Accomplishment:
Discovered how and why Kailia is going to leave Falcon's place alone.

Today's Target:
Write the scene (above).
Update reverse-outline. (Don't worry, I know what I mean, and that's what's important. [g])

On the Percolator:
Need to read MARU through from beginning so as not to lose the reins on the timetable before I go any further.
Also need to read through the western and start figuring out how to fill in the holes.

Pocket Full O' Goodies

* Today was a good day. I consolidated all of my MARU (fantasy novel) files into one, did a bit of rewriting on Chapter One, and did an actual word count, rather than the guesstimate I had on my word-o-meter previously. I had almost twice as many words as I thought (including today's work). :)

* Check out Flogging The Quill for some useful tidbits, if you haven't already. One of the recent posts there will be a bit of deja vu for Books & Writers forumites - about what should be on the first page of your novel. But there are lots of other goodies, too. Among them a reminder about using the Bookmarks feature in word processing software. (I use MS Word and Open Office and both have the feature.) Very, very useful! Especially since I am condensing my "million files" method into one big file per MSS.

* Another happy little find today was iFinger 2.1 with a very handy dictionary that parks on your browser and WP title bar. (You can get the Mirriam-Webster free, or a limited-time trial version of one of the OEDs. I got both and they work together.) I got it from Download.com.

Okay, that's it for me today. Happy writing, writers!