Y Is For… Yarn – Knit and Crochet; Sisters of the Same Legacy

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Yarn.  It’s seductive.  Here at Noon & Wilder, we have both kinds of textile arts – knitting and crochet.  I know, I know, apocryphal.  But it works for us.  I helps that I was able to teach Rachel some of the basics of crochet, and she took it from there.

Crochet is actually older than knitting by quite a bit; scholars believe that it started as a functional craft for making things like fishing nets.  The earliest known knitted textiles, on the other hand, were socks and underwear – woven broadcloth couldn’t curve around the human form and therefore led to very uncomfortable intimate-wear.

So, in a real sense, textile arts brought us naughty lingerie.

Betcha didn’t see that comin’, eh?  Not your grandmothers crafts anymore.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What juxtapositions of history and modern life catch your fancy?

 

X Is For… Xenophobia

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XXenophobia is the fear of the other, that which is foreign or strange.  It’s most commonly used to refer to people who irrationally dislike foreigners, but it can be broader than that.  I think it’s a very sad thing to be a xenophobe; imagine how lonely they are.  They don’t interact with others outside their group, so they’re not exposed to new ideas; they don’t socialize with people from other places so they never get to realize how wonderful and filled with amazing things the world can be; and they remain closed and ignorant.

I remember when I was small that my parents took me traveling with them.  While I was not fortunate enough to be able to go overseas, I did travel around the States quite a bit and have learned several languages.  It’s been my experience that people who like to travel are less frequently xenophobic than those who stay in their own little universe.  What surprised me the most, though, is that when I came to Chicago, (which is the third-largest city in the U.S.), I met many, many people who had never traveled beyond the city’s limits – and yet, to me, Chicago is exotic and full of many different cultures.

So I ask you, Dear Reader.
If money and time were no object, where would you travel?

W Is For… Were Are the Wheres?

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WWerewolves.  They spawned a whole literature, and other creatures – cat shifters, dog shifters, bird shifters, snake shifters…

Recently, we were working with our editor at Red Quill and she pointed out that “lycanthrope” means, literally, werewolf:  from the Latin, and before that Greek, meaning wolf man.

It struck me by complete surprise.  I mean, I know that the meaning of lycanthrope is wolf man, but somehow I just extrapolated from there to all shifters being lycanthropes or catching lycanthropy – cat lycanthropy, dog lycanthropy, etc.  It doesn’t help that the genre seems to think that too, and has used lycanthropy as a catch-all term.  We batted around some ideas for things like felisthropy, but it sounded too contrived and goofy.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What words have stumped you, once you’ve discovered their true meanings?

V Is For… Volodya, and Other Unpronounceable Names

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VNames are tricky.  I’ve worked with internationals most of my career, and the first difficult name I encountered was Nguyen, which is a very common family name of Vietnamese origin.  It’s pronounced, by the way, like “Win.”  Currently, I live and work in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of Chicago; there are seventeen different languages just on my block – people from the Americas, (English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Jamaican, and a whole host of smaller regional languages); Europe, (French, German, Romanian, Polish, and Russian); the Middle East, (Arabic, Farsi, and some other languages); Africa, (Ghanan, Nigerian, Swahili – which is, itself, a trade language and not of any one ethnic group); and Asia, (Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Chinese – which isn’t a language but a whole host of them, most common of which are Mandarin and Cantonese).  We also have a large Jewish population, and its a varied one in and of itself – some of its members speak English, others Yiddish or the language of their country of origin, and many, many of them speak Hebrew.

One thing I’ve noticed about Americans is how chauvinist we are about names.  We have trouble with foreign words, much less names, and I’ve met many, many people who only speak one language who insist they cannot possibly say such a foreign-sounding name as [insert name here].  For example, I worked with a lady who insisted that the last name “Bougoulas” was “Boogaloo.”  The gentleman whose name it was acted very graciously and didn’t appear offended, but I have to wonder how many times he’d encountered people unwilling to say “Boo-goo-lass.”  And that’s not even a “difficult” name.  Try saying some of the names from Africa, that use consonants next to each other in ways American English speakers aren’t familiar with – Mkuto, for example.

When Rachel and I wrote Burning Bright, the main character’s original name is Volodya, which is short for Vladimir in Russian.  We were advised to pick a different name, because it was felt that Volodya was too difficult for readers to enjoy.   We selected Sasha, which is short for Aleksandr in Russian.  It worked and we’re used to it now, but it was a hard choice to make.

What about you, Dear Reader?
Do you prefer familiar names, or do you like a touch of the exotic?

U Is For… Understanding!

Noon and Wilder Posted on by

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I have found, in writing, that I need to get deeply into a project before I know where it’s going.  I typically need to write 20,000 to 30,000 words before I have a good feel for it, and know who the characters are and where they’re going.  Sometimes I know the plot of the book, other times I don’t.  But I definitely don’t know the world or the people in it without that first drafting process.

I have met writers that have a few thousand words, or maybe a thousand, and get lost in the plotting and outlining process.  I knew a writer that said he needed to get the “story beats” down first.  He was so insistent on that, that he refused outright to do any writing until that was done.  When I asked him what “story beats” were, he didn’t have a concrete answer, and what I gleaned from his answer is that he puts the story arc on index cards.  That’s fine and dandy if it helps you get on the page.  But since it didn’t help him, and he was effectively blocked by trying to do it, I’d argue it’s not useful.

It’s like many things:  it’s a lot harder to rock the boat when you’re rowing.  Get into the project.  Learn to draft.  Put down the words.  Trust yourself, and trust story.  Tell the critic that says it’s not worth it, no one wants to read it, you don’t know how to do it, and all the other bullshit that critics like to say, that they’re on vacation for the next 30 minutes – set the timer and just draft.  Write.  It’s called a “rough” draft for a reason – but it’s a helluva lot harder to edit it if it hasn’t been written yet.  So write it.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What advice do you have for someone starting something new?

T Is For… Truffles!

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Ah, yes. Truffles.  While there are truffles here on Earth, the first being a type of chocolate confection and the second being a type of mushroom confection, truffles really are a cross between a Cocker Spaniel and an aardvark.

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See? Aren’t they adorable?  Truffles have the fur of the Cocker Spaniel, and similar coloring for the most part, (a range of browns and tans), and their snouts are a little longer and more like a small elephant’s than the aardvark’s.

Why a truffle?

Well, it’s like this:  the first settlers to Persis saw the native animals and their resemblance to Old Earth animals.  Then they realized that the primary food source for truffles was a type of plant that grows under the surface of the sand, and the truffles use their long snouts to reach it.  They reminded the settlers of the pigs that are used in hunting the valuable truffle mushrooms.   The name got shortened to truffle, and it stuck – the native animals were then known as truffles.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What would an animal that you made up look like?

S Is For… Sapphire Dream!

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I adore gems.  Did you ever see the animated movie, The Secret of NIMH?  There’s a character of a magpie who likes, as he calls them, “Sparklies.”  Yup.  Me, to a “T”.  When we started writing the Persis Chronicles, we decided to name the different Keeps, which are essentially universities, after gems and precious stones.  As time went on, there’s even a difference between the Gem Keeps and the Stone Keeps, with the Gem Keeps perceived to be higher class or more desirable.

The next book in the Persis Chronicles is Sapphire Dream, and Rachel and I are working on final edits now so we can submit it for consideration (so please, keep your fingers crossed).  The story is about a young man named Cheula, whose first Contract didn’t go as planned.  The man with whom he Contracted was abusive and, while Cheula wanted the time to be a success, it didn’t work out and Cheula had to call the Seekers, equivalent to the police.

The most interesting part, for me, about writing this one is that there’s several elements that are directly out of real life – domestic abuse, independence, being willing and able to ask for help, and how to manage home relationships and sexuality.  Weaving those kinds of real-world things into a story is fun and rewarding because it makes it more real to me.  The characters become real people in the process.

What about you, Dear Reader?
How much “real” do you like in your fiction?

R Is For… Rhyming!

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Rhyming is language played with.  To be able to write lines that rhyme takes skill and a willingness to bat words around, form and re-form them into pleasing shapes all while creating a picture in the mind of the reader.

The best rhymes create more than one picture.  They can be funny, pithy, convey truth, pathos, be sung, be performed, but above all, they exult in the language and its usage.

My favorite poet is Ogden Nash.  He is known for his use of humor in his poems, and for making up words (like “Bryaness,” above).  But what I like most about him is his economical use of language and the way he can make something funny with a twist:

The Porcupine by Ogden Nash

Any hound a porcupine nudges
Can’t be blamed for harboring grudges.
I know one hound that laughed all winter
At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.

 

If you are a wordsmith and enjoy poems, I found a site called Vhinkle that has a nice little glossary of poetry terms, here.  You might just lose an hour or two poking around and writing your own examples, so be warned.

What about you, Dear Reader?
Who is your favorite poet?

Q Is For… Quitting Is the Only Way To Fail

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Q 2
The secret to success is to work for it and not give up.  I remember reading once, I think in one of Covey’s books, that failures have no idea why they failed, but successful people can tell you every step they took.  The lesson there is that successful people have a plan, they work the plan, and they keep going after failure.

Q 3
Being an entrepreneur is challenging.  We have to have a particular kind of naivete in the face of others’ comments that “your book will never sell,” “readers don’t want new writers,” and all the other naysayers that are trying, they say, to “help” us.   If we are daring enough to try other entrepreneurial ideas, it’s the same thing – I have a friend who wants to open a restaurant/bar and has been told a whole bunch of reasons why it’s a dumb idea.

None of those naysayers are right, but it’s hard to see that when we’re risking our reputations and sometimes real money on our dreams.  Learning to surround ourselves with people who will safeguard our baby ideas and shepherd our dreams is difficult.  Skepticism is seen as smart or wise, and the willingness to risk is seen as reckless.

Q 4

Writers become authors because we love telling stories and we love it so much that we have to do it, whether it “pays for itself” or not.  We risk putting our stories out there into the world, and we risk looking like fools.

It’s worth it.

What about you, Dear Reader?
What would you risk if you knew you could not fail?

P Is For… Publishing!

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PHa! I went in today to work on my posts for next week and thought I’d already written – and posted – today’s post.  I was in a fog yesterday, since Rachel Wilder is here for two whole weeks of vacation and work, and I have not yet recovered my brain from its preparatory blitz.

That’s one of the changes that’s happened in publishing, which is, after all, the subject of today’s post.  We’ve gotten so electronic, and life has become so 24/7 online access, that the boundaries have blurred between “work” and “play.”  In the old days, when we went on vacation, we went away on vacation – no phone, no laptop, no nothing.  Gradually that changed and now we’ve become a society of communicators – we’re now on, and expected to be available, around the clock.

I think another huge change is the migration to self publishing.  A lot of authors have made the switch in the last 18 months, people who never would have done it even two years ago.  Authors are now learning about balance in the sense that they’re deciding whether or not to go back into working with a house or whether to strike out on their own, or to blend the two depending on the project.

What hasn’t changed is the reader’s thirst for good stuff to read.  Yes, there’ve been some notable “bad books” lately, but let’s face it – readers are educated consumers in the sense that they know what they like, and, frankly, on what they want to spend money.  And that “they” for readers is really a “we,” isn’t it?  I haven’t met a writer yet who isn’t also, and first, a reader.  So we are still looking around for material that will engage us, turn us on, and make us satisfied (which suddenly sounded way more salacious than I meant it).

What about you, Dear Reader?
What changes have you seen in the last few years as regards publishing?