There’s a weekly meme over at Booking Through Thursday which is usually based on reading, but this week, it was geared toward writing, so I thought I’d chime in here. Everybody (meaning you) is free to play along–all you need to do is post an answer on your blog and then head over to BTT and leave a comment so the other participants can find you.

Anyway, here’s mine:

• Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
• Turn to page 123.
• What is the first sentence on the page?
• The last sentence on the page?
• Now . . . connect them together….
  (And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

My nearest book is The Snake, the Crocodile & the Dog by Elizabeth Peters.

Howard arrived in time to see the end of this performance.

“Bravo!” he called as the band began to play the performers off the stage. “That looked wonderful, I can’t believe I missed it.”

“Waylaid by thieves, no doubt?” I inquired gently, inquisitively raising one eyebrow.

“Of a surity. Definite thieves. I barely escaped with my life.”

“Yet you managed to escape with your theater ticket intact. How very fortunate. Were there many of them, to detain you through the entire first act?”

“Dozens.”

“But you managed to save your wrist watch, your cufflinks, and the flower in your lapel. Are you quite certain there were more than one?”

“The plural, decidedly,” said Howard.

This was fun!

(And, actually, I was going to use the writing book I had sitting nearby and come up with something closer to this blog’s “theme,” but the two sentences, “It’s risky, what you’re doing,” and “If you’re not interested, you can be sure your reader will feel like tearing her hair out–if not yours.” But tying those two sentences together sure sounded like they were a succinct summation of my post from yesterday, so … I went with the fiction instead!)

If you haven’t seen it, I’ve got a guest-post over at Laura’s Writing Thoughts today.

Go over and read it and then, after, go read the rest of her blog, if you haven’t already.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make small talk and see if there’s anything else I can help her with, all while getting in her way in the politest possible way … because that’s what guests do!

 (Oh, and speaking of guest-posts, this one of Joanna’s over at Word Sell is delicious.)

Well, I wish I’d known this yesterday….

Not only was March Fourth the only day on the calendar that is a complete sentence, but it was also National Grammar Day.

Who knew?

(I mean, other than Sharon at Daily Writing Tips, which is where I saw it.)

Of course, I should probably have posted about this earlier (and maybe gotten some more votes), but Laura over at the Writing Thoughts blog recently asked for votes for favorite writing blogs, and mine came up as one of the winners.

I’m in excellent company, and I wanted to spread some link-love to the other, no doubt more worthy, winners:

First Place Blogs

Grow Your Writing Business
Web Content Writer Tips

Second Place Blogs

Freelance Writing Jobs
Get Paid To Write Online
Inkthinker
The Article Writer
Punctuality Rules
Writing Forward

For that matter, check out the list of original “contestants,” because they’re all excellent.

Content Done Better; The CopyWriter Underground; Freelance Writing Jobs; Words On The Page; Grow Your Writing Business; Creative & Editorial Freelancing; The Writing Mother; Freelancing Journey; The Golden Pencil; Angela Booth’s Writing Blog; The Article Writer; Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers; Inkthinker; Getting It Write For You; A Writer’s Words, and Editor’s Eye; Writing Spark; Writer’s Notes; Confident Writing; Grammar Girl; A Writer’s Rites; Write Stuff; The Copywriting Maven; The Copywriter’s Crucible; Drawing on Words; ChrisBlogging;
Lis Garrett ~ A Writer’s Woolgatherings; Get Paid to Write Online; Web Writing Info; All Freelance Writing; Michael Stelzner’s Blog Writing White Papers; The Writer’s Blog by Dana Prince; JCM Enterprises; Manage Your Writing; The Hidden Writer; Plagiarism Today; Kate Blogs About; The Writing Life; Wordpreneur; Writing FORWARD); Write-from-home.com; The Renegade Writer Blog; Marcom Writer Blog; and lastly, me at Punctuality Rules!

As I say, I’m in great company. Thanks so much, Laura!

Eep! My sidebar disappeared and I have NO idea why. I’m looking, but since I know practically nothing about CSS, um, well, at least the POSTS are still showing…. Any suggestions? I swear, all I was trying to do was add the phrase “Join the discussion” next to the Comments link, but when I clicked save and took a look … poof! No more sidebar.

Hey folks–I know it has nothing to do with writing or manners or any of the things I usually talk about–but if you’re even remotely a “crafty” kind of person, would you be willing to do me a favor and come take a survey about online knitting lessons? It would be greatly appreciated. As added incentive, if you complete the survey, your name will be automatically entered in a raffle.

Click Here to take the survey

Thanks, everyone! And extra thanks if you help spread the word, too–the more responses the better!

Okay, Joanna and Brad are asking about “connecting words,” and they don’t mean conjunctions like “and” or “but.” No, what they’re looking for are unique, or treasured words that we’ve found out and about in our daily travels, words that might not be common usage, or often heard, but which struck a chord for some reason.

I love the idea of this question, but I’m having the hardest time answering it. I’ve got a good vocabulary, you see. Not perfect, but except for obscure medical and scientific terms, it’s fairly rare for me to come across a word with which I’m not familiar. It happens, but not often. (Maybe browsing through dictionaries in my free time–not to mention a prodigious reading habit–really did pay off.) So, trying to identify a word . . . a real word . . . is tricky.

Because, well, first, I thought of ” Kinnearing,” which is a perfect, made-up word coined by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, and which has taken the blog-world by storm. (Heck, I saw it mentioned on the Teaching Sells forum last month, so clearly it’s spreading beyond knit-bloggers.) (Added on 12/23/07: This IS a “real” word now . . . it made the NYTimes list of Buzzwords of 2007. “To take a candid photograph surreptitiously, especially by holding the camera low and out of the line of sight. Coined in August by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the Yarn Harlot blog when she attempted to take a photograph during an encounter with the actor Greg Kinnear at an airport.” How nifty is that?)

I’ve always been fond of the word “grembling” which was coined by Anne McCaffrey, as a blend of the Scots’ “greeting” and “grumbling” to describe a combination of whining, wailing, and general self-pity. It’s really a fabulous word, but since (to my knowledge) it’s manufactured and not a “real” word, no matter how obscure, it takes too much explanation to use it. A darn shame, that.

I like the word “goleor,” too . . . the Celtic word that is the root for “galore,” meaning a plentitude, a plethora of things. But it, too, is so obscure (although at least real), that again, it’s more or less impossible to use it. For that matter, “plethora” is a delightful word. I still remember the first place I saw it used, describing the “plethora of skirts” frothing around the ankles of native women. I’ve always rather liked “cogitate,” too, for thinking. My best friend and I used it in high school all the time: one of us would ask a question and the other, while deciding on her answer, would say, “Think, think think. Cogitate, cogitate, cogitate.”

Then, there’s family slang, like “lammies” for rubber bands, and “garjib” for garbage. (The source being we children, when we were too young to pronounce things properly.) “Xausted,” gets used quite a lot, still, as in “I’m so tired, I’m too exhausted even to use the entire word.”

Oh yes, and then, “duffel.” There’s a whole mythology of duffels in my family which also dates back to my best friend and me, when we were silly teenagers. During school shopping, Mom picked me up a duffel bag to use for my books and joked, “Now you’ll finally have some place to put all those duffels that have been running around.” We laughed, and I repeated it to my best friend and, suddenly, the Duffel was born … invisible, duffel-bag-shaped creatures with feet but no legs, that hopped everywhere they went and said nothing but “Duffel, duf, duffel.” It’s gotten to the point that, even now, we can still make each other laugh by saying “duffel,” and can instantaneously identify ourselves to one another by saying “duffel” instead of “hello” on the phone. (We even used to argue about which of us would have DUFFEL on our car’s license plate, but since she preferred the DUFFLE spelling, we worked that out.)

Hmm. Actually, I think I’m going to have to say that my favorite connecting word has got to be Duffel. There are too many giggles and laughs tied up with that word for there to be any choice. Pity she doesn’t have a blog I could link to–but I included a little of her artwork for you. Why don’t you come play, too? What words have forged connections for you?

birth

Synonyms: nativity

Related Words: creation, genesis, origination, rise; bearing, childbearing, labor, parturition; begetting, breeding, fathering, generation, mothering, reproduction, siring, spawning; fatherhood, maternity, motherhood, parenthood, paternity

Yep, it’s my birthday. And, see? I brought some cake.

Now, today seems the perfect time to do this meme that I came across over here yesterday:

The idea is to tell what I was doing 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago. She added 40 to this meme, so I played along with that, too. Feel free to join in and do this one as well, if you’re interested.

10 years ago: 1997. 31 years old. I had just finished taking swimming lessons for the first time in my life, and had a friend teach me to drive a stick shift (which I haven’t done since). I had figured I wanted to start that new decade off by checking a few things off my life list.

20 years ago. 1987. 21 years old. I was in London for the semester in college, my Junior year. And my actual, 21st birthday? I spent that actual day all alone in Trier, Germany, being stood up by a no-show pen-pal, while my camera broke, the batteries in my walkman died, and I couldn’t find a thing in English to read, and ended up having supper at McDonalds. Well, it was memorable!

30 years ago. 1977. 11 years old. Um . . . fifth grade. Chances are we were listening to the 1776 soundtrack in school. Honestly, I’ve got nothing.

40 years ago. 1967. 1 year old. That was obviously a big day, being my first birthday and all, but I have to tell you, I don’t remember much of it. I did, however, get my all-time-favorite doll, Buttons, that birthday. You can see her in this picture with little-bitty me. She spends her time in the guest room these days, but she’s still very much loved.