Apophasis

How did you all get on with the defenestration (throwing out the window) from last week’s post? I managed to cull my inbox down from nearly 100 emails to a mere 60. I am trying to focus on how smug I will feel (for about five minutes) with an empty inbox.

This week’s word is one I have never used but intend to adopt henceforth, apophasis – alluding to something by denying that it will be mentioned, as in “I will not bring up my opponent’s questionable financial dealings.” It is pronounced a-pof-a-sis. I love this word. I suspect they teach this practice in political training school. Or perhaps it is subconscious? I adore when someone blurts in conversation “now you know I don’t gossip, but…”. You just know you’re in for a tasty morsel of scandal. Or “I could tell you stories about him, but I won’t” you can be sure to unearth the malicious “facts” within seconds of pressing the speaker to reveal their inside knowledge. There’s something about knowing a discreditable secret which simply urges us to speak out. I reckon such gossip even circulated around ancient campfires at the mouths of caves.

With less than ten days left until Christmas and an ever-lengthening list of tasks to achieve before then I thought I’d share some of my decorations (completed yesterday) with you. Our contorted hazel tree in the front garden is finally large enough this year for a string of white fairy lights and it looks magical but sadly my camera isn’t up to the job of outdoor nighttime photography so I’ll ask you to use your imaginations.

I don’t believe in perfectly co-ordinated trees. They look wonderful, that’s true, but for me they have no soul. Instead, amongst a motley collection of decorations made by my children, and some selected for sheer silliness, we hang our travel ornaments. Everytime we travel to another country, we pick up something to hang on our tree. They’re not always festive, but it means that in the depths of winter we relieve many happy trips. There’s the glass grapes from Malta, the sea-shells from our honeymoon in Mauritius, a statue of liberty from my sister’s visit to NY, an Eiffel Tower bauble, a woollen dotty sphere from Glasgow, a wooden pinochio from Tuscany (the home of the original story), a fairytale frog prince from Cork, a knight from Puy de Fou in France, connemara marble cross and a jester (see the banner on this blog) from Clifden, a dice from Vegas, and many others. Our tree looks rather funny, but we love it.

If you’re decorating your home this week I hope you enjoy it.

happy reading and writing,

Grace

Defenestration

Hello!

It’s December now and the madness of NaNoWriMo is behind me. Writing 55,000 words in just one month now seems like something entirely normal to have achieved. I shall have to aim higher next year just for fun.

However, December brings its own challenges. Having pushed aside all thoughts of Christmas preparation during November the whole shebang has landed on top of me now. I see now (as I see about this time every year) that hand-crafting some gifts and all my cards is lovely but challenging on my schedule. The temptation to throw the notion of handmade gifts out the window was strong upon me this week. I finished making the cards tonight though, and that’s one item off my ever-increasing list of things to do before the 25th of the month. Instead I am trying to combine my prepwork with chucking some other items literally or metephorically out the window. There’s something about a clearout that makes me feel more in control of my To Do List.

Defenestration (the act or art of throwing things out the window) is a wonderful word and does raise the question of why we need a term for it, as well as, presumably, fenestration for taking things in by the window.  I’ve seen the fenestration part a few times by removal people during house-moves, so that makes sense. How else can you get bulky items into houses, unless you build them within? A writing acquaintance did point out that up until the advent of modern plumbing a large amount of rubbish (and less salubrious items) were simply tossed out the window. Now when the cries of “Garde Loo!” (a corruption of Gardez L’eau – watch out for “water”) ceased to echo around the narrow lanes of towns in Western Europe with the arrival of indoor plumbing and luxuries like rubbish collections, the legislators had to stop the die-hards from continuing the practice, hence the laws in many areas to prevent defenestration. I imagine it extends to the defenestration of people also. Which is good, depending on the person.

So, it’s December and I’m defenestrating (legally and to recycling spots where possible) all manner of things;

• Odd scraps of paper with addresses on them – now I have a neat spreadsheet for my Christmas card mailing list.
• Odd scraps of fabric – being transformed into fabric bracelets for my giftlist and the rest is for a fabric wreath to make with my children.
• My 2009 writing aims – most completed, the rest are being transformed into shiny new goals for 2010.
• Incoming stamps – saved for charity.
• My heaving inbox of email – ok I admit I’m not conquering this just yet, but I’m on the case. And (pardon the pun) at least I can literally throw it out of Windows ™.
• My towering piles of writing paperwork – a horrible task this last one. I’m great about dealing with incoming mail. I dispose of 90% on the day and the rest is filed properly or dealt with within 48 hours. But I can’t bear to remove a shred of writing related research torn from newspapers and magazines. I have a filing system but I don’t use it. This might need to go out the window and be revamped in 2010. All suggestions welcome.

What would you like to defenestrate from your life? Perhaps December is the time to do it. Clear the decks for a bright new year?

happy reading, writing, and defenestrating,

Grace

I’m Guest-blogging at Writer Inspired this Week

Hi,

many thanks to Mary Jo Campbell (aka “Mary Jo” on Nano) who asked me to guest blog about being an ML this month. You’ll see the results at her blog, Writer Inspired today  or archived here.

So if you’ve ever been curious about the life of an ML, drop by and see what I made of my first year “in charge” of the Ireland NorthEast NaNoWriMo region.

happy reading, Grace

Strokestown Poetry Contest (Ireland)

I just spotted this listing over at Funds for Writers and wanted to pass it on to any Irish Writers (I think it may be open to international poets also, please check their site for full terms and conditions).

STROKESTOWN INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE
Entry fee is €5
Prizes of  €4,000, €2,000 and €1,000 for an unpublished poem in English not exceeding 70 lines.

In addition the ten short-listed poets are invited to read a selection of their work at the festival for a reading fee and traveling expenses totaling €400 (approximately £380 / $640).

Deadline is 5th of February 5 2010 so get writing.

happy reading and writing,

Grace

I won NaNoWriMo!

Third attempt, being volunteer Municipal Liasion as well, and I did it. I am so proud of myself and think I have the core of a good first draft. I made it to 50,000 words in just 25 days. I’ll be back with a more detailed blog post in December as I’m still writing away on my novel, but I wanted to shout out to the world first.

Jeggings, Pumpkins, and NaNoWriMo – oh my!

Hi,

Right, first things first. I saw a new word today and I thought I’d better pass it on to my fellow word-lovers for comment. Jeggings. Have you seen it? It was displayed in a ladies clothing store on a pair of super-slim-fitting leggings which look like denim (but feel more like a heavy jersey/knit fabric). Basically they are the zenith of skinny jeans which have been a huge thing here for a few years now. Not a style I favor…I walk, I have calf muscles, ergo skinny jeans don’t work for me. But I rather like the word and I think it might stick. What do you think?

I remember wearing leggings in Calgary, Canada on a visit to a cousin there in the mid 1990s and her advising me to change into something else as the locals considered them to be thermal underwear. They thought I was wearing my underwear in public! Have leggings crossed the atlantic since?  What would they make of jeggings?

Pumpkins then, we spent the afternoon carving them – three varieties of vampire pumpkins and one “scary butterfly”. You can tell I have a young daughter, can’t you? I’ll try to remember to take a photo of them all lit up tomorrow night and post it here as I’m rather proud of our collection. They may not be high-art, but they were fun. Very few people in our area carve pumpkins, they tend to make do with plastic ones.

NaNoWriMo starts in less than two days. My outline still has many holes in it but thanks to a severe ear infection this week I’m just going to have to live with that. For me however, the adventure begins tomorrow when I host my first ever NaNo event as an ML (organiser). Thankfully I know I have at least two other writers coming along. For a while there I thought it was just going to be me, looking lonesome. In an effort to support me in my attempt to write 50,000 words of my novel in just 30 days my husband is threatening to unplug our internet router and take it with him to work so I can’t waste my time online except for my one designated hour in the evening for my ML role. I know he’s right, but I feel like an addict deprived of my fix at the mere thought. Could you manage 24 hours without the Web?

Now for some good news – I’m definitely in the forthcoming print anthology “A Cup of Comfort for a Better World” (due to hit the shelves in March 2010). I’m thrilled, particularly when I heard there were more than 2,000 entries submitted. I’ll post a link to it once it’s available.

Postings here during November will be erratic as I’ll be pouring my energy into novel-writing, see you all in December,

Grace

Brave, Crazy, Inspired, Inspirational, Creative

Helping with Nano 2009

Ok, this week’s word is none of the above, but these do all describe the participants in National Novel Writing Month (November) which is starting its tenth year of activity in two week’s time for more than 150,000 aspiring novellists. I’ll be among them for the third year and this year I will be trying to organise the scribes in Ireland NorthEast as I’m volunteering as a municipal liaison. The National part of the title isn’t strictly accurate these days. Participants are spread right across the globe and languages other than English are catered for. We already have more than 1,000 writers in Ireland registered and ready to go.

There’s just one snag – I can’t decide which novel to start (my books tend to finish at the 100,000 word mark so Nano will get me halfway on a first draft). Do I go with a humourous tale of demented housewives on the edge, a more serious multi-viewpoint novel about a disparate group of people living in the west of Ireland, or a two-hander about a couple of reluctant parents? Or something else entirely? All I know is that I have to decide soon so suggestions are welcome! Either way, my November writing time may well be limited so don’t be surprised if this blog lapses until early December except for updates on my NaNoWriMo progress.

In the meantime if you’ve ever thought “I’d love to write a book someday”, now is your chance. Participation is free and there is major fun to be had along the way. Check out the site and see what you can do with just 1800 words a day.

Now, the actual word for today is termagant which a friend recently (incorrectly) described herself as. Word a Day says this is a shrewish woman and that’s what she meant. I’d never heard it before, had you? Apparently it’s one of those words which is confused from birth. Europeans mistakenly thought it was a deity worshiped by Muslims. It came to be seen as any brawling, difficult character in morality plays and gradually came to be associated only with females, for some reason which escapes me (probably because I’m a female). It occurs to me that it could be a useful species of invective against anybody in your life who is irritating you but who is unlikely to go and look it up after you apply it to them, in the sweetest of tones.

I’m just waiting for a chance to use it now…

Happy writing and reading,

Grace

ps. for those of you interested in the Big Knit hats – I managed 14 in the end.

Amanuensis

The word for today is amanuensis, purely because it came up in a book I am reading currently and sent me to the dictionary for a definition. Pronounced uh-man-you-EN-sis, it means someone who is hired to copy down words for someone else, so if you’re a secretery who is bored with his/her job title you could always try this one out instead. The word comes from Latin and Indo-European roots which mean hand-slave.

The book I was reading – an excellent biography of Robert Hooke, “The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, the man who measured London” by Lisa Jardine reckoned that Hooke was amanuensis to Robert Boyle (Boyle’s law etc, famous Irish-Anglo scientist of the 1650s-1680s) but Hooke did plenty in his own right and sadly ended up overshadowed by Newton, Christopher Wren, Boyle and other upper-class scientists of his era for a variety of reasons despite being equally responsible with Wren for the rebuilding of London after the great fire. It’s an interesting tale if you’ve any interest in early science.

Of course Boyle could afford to hire Hooke to transcribe (and operate and often design) his experiments for him as he came from landed gentry, but most authors of more modern times don’t have a secretary, we just type away on computers or other mechanical and electronic devices. However one book I browsed this weekend did come with the help of an amanuensis – the new one by Terry Pratchett in which he is quick to thank his typist (helping him as his health fails) and noting that he even had the wit to laugh at the right bits. Now there’s a typing job I wouldn’t mind having, imagine how much you’d learn from a master of words like that, even just by copying his words on the screen from dictation tapes, or whatever.

But would I, in a world where I’d won the lottery, like having a helper like that? No, I don’t think so, not unless I required one for health reasons. Even my own husband can’t read my handwriting (something I am unjustly proud of) so transcribing my often convoluted paper drafts would be cruel torture for a typist. I credit my own erratic scrawl with my ability to read pretty much anybody’s handwriting (in a language I understand, of course). I can even cope with notoriously illegible doctor’s prescriptions. I also dislike having someone about while I write, or at least not someone who is paying attention. I am fine with writing in a large crowd, at an airport or on a train etc. Thankfully I learnt how to type properly (on old heavy manual typewriters) at a very young age so I don’t need a secretary anyhow.

What about you? How would a hand-slave aid your life?

Now if you could get me a Jeeves-style manservant, I would snap up the offer; diplomacy, someone else to deal with dreary tasks like tax-returns and gifts for inlaws and ironing, wit, and support on every social event, not to mention always having the perfect outfit laid out for me each day. Yes, that I could live with.

Until next time, happy writing, reading, and word fooling,

Grace

Scythes, sickles, and combine harvesters

Hello,

In this part of the world, it’s harvest time. Most of the work is finished near me, the hay is saved (I saw some old-fashioned pitchfork created haystacks the other day – a rare sight now), most of the cereal crops are in and I run less risk of encountering a massive combine harvester on the local narrow lanes, but I’m still passing plenty of root-vegetable trucks and in my own garden I’m gathering about 15 tomatoes at day (I grow 8 tomato plants – roma plum tomatoes and gardener’s delight cherry tomatoes outdoors) knowing that the first frosts will arrive here soon and then I’ll have to ripen the rest indoors (I will be eating them until Christmas). I’ve jarred up my dried herbs, potted up a bounty of blackberry and apple jam (my second favourite, damson is best but my tree is young and non-productive so far), and gathered the onions and garlic that survived the wet clay I planted them in. I’ve still got leeks, parsnips, beetroots, lettuce, courgette, carrots, apples, crab apples, and sconzonera (like a nutty carrot – delightful) to gather in over the next month or so. I love this time of year!

It is also the time of year when my children’s minds turn obsessively to the crucial decision of “which costume for Halloween?” Thankfully for my wallet my youngest is happy to wear last year’s black and pink witch costume again, especially as I’ve given in to her request for a broomstick to embellish the ensemble. My eldest can be trickier as he tends to change his mind at the last minute in an attempt to gain a second costume for our literally bursting costume box. We had a few hours, just the two of us, last Friday, and I sat him down with paper and pencil and we designed his outfit. Re-using a previous year’s skeleton outfit and adding a shop-bought scythe (plastic, I hasten to add), and a black cloak which I will try to construct on my trusty sewing machine, I think we have the core of an excellent costume of Death from the Discworld. He hasn’t read the wonderful Terry Pratchett books yet, but he loves the covers and is confident (more than I am) that I can create a suitably spooky look by October 31st. However my sister (who joins us on the night with her own son) has just upped the ante by texting me a picture of her costume so now I have to create something for myself – argh. Not enough hours in the day!

Anyhow, scythes were naturally a topic in our house this week and co-incidentally so were combine harvesters due to an animated one in a school story. I had to explain how each worked. Did you know you can still do courses on how to cut your fields by scythe and we had proverbs involving them? I’d say it’s a great workout and in fact I think the company I previously worked for once did a charity meadow-reap in a park by scythe and had half the staff out with bad backs afterwards. I’ve never handled a real one, but I have played with a (very blunt) sickle as several hung on the garden wall of my grandparents’ home and they fascinated me. I suppose the soviet hammer (industry) and sickle (agriculture) was a clever piece of design considering it covered the two big employments of the day. Of course a sickle is a unit of currency in Harry Potter’s world, I doubt Stalin would like that too much. If you’re interested in either tool for your own plot, much to my surprise, they can both still be bought online – do a quick google search.

If you’re harvesting this month, I wish you sharp tools, huge crops, crisp weather, and no back-ache.

Happy writing and reading,

Grace

Good for Body and Soul

Hallo,

No unusual word today as I’m on retreat. Yes, retreat. Not the praying sort (although those are fine too), this is a writing retreat. So technically I shouldn’t be online at all as I’ve foresworn email and internet for three days. I’ve been writing in new places (the beach was this morning’s venue and it was COLD), trying out writing exercises, using prompts, and writing different types of work, even poetry which is rare indeed for me. It has been fun so far – two more days to go.

But I did want to post a couple of links here tonight.

2008 Big Knit Hats

First up is Innocent Smoothies Big Knit. This has been run annually for a few years now (this will be my third year taking part). Crafters internationally create mini hats to top Innocent smoothie bottles which are then sold in the shops and part of the profit (about 50p for each bottle) goes to Age Concern (UK) and Help the Aged (Ireland). It’s a fun way to use up your stash and can be competitive fun in knitting groups. There are patterns on the site (if you crochet, I can send you on a couple – comment me) and the postal deadline is 16th October so get going fast.

Secondly is another crafting charity site – this time there’s a different project depending on what the charity needs – Craft Hope is simply about crafters working together to help those in need. I love their attitude and will definitely be taking part in their next project.

We can all make a difference if we try,

happy writing, reading, and crafting,

Grace