It’s one of those conical pieces of writerly advice: “don’t abuse the thesaurus.” The problem being that you find words that are unnatural and discordant with your tone and style, and they stick out, and it sounds bad and reads worse.

In a similar vein I remember someone quoted Heinlein as saying that always wrote adult novels using the simplest language he could think of, for accessibility reasons, but in young adult novels, or stories pitched to the YA audience, he would occasionally throw in a hard word, because kids liked feeling like they were being trusted to be smart enough to handle complicated things.

So I’ll admit that I occasionally use a thesaurus. More often than not, it’s to remember a simpler word. Like, in something I’m currently writing, I just looked up “concern” to find “interest,” because I was having something of fixation, and the reference was good to get me unstuck. We can all imagine, of course, how this could have gone awry.

From the comments at Digg, this one, is… precious.:

Digg - Opera legend Pavarotti dies at 71:

I think I’ll miss his beard the most.

I can’t imagine having a voice like his, let alone that beard. R.I.P man.

(from Digg Comments.)

I’ve been working on a paper this morning, and thus have been a somewhat lazy blogger. Here are some quick notes before I runn off to class.

• I’m not putting up a TealArt entry this morning, and if I put something up this afternoon, it’ll be a quickie. I’m going to save the knitting essays that I have written for next week, when they’ll have enough time to breathe properly.
• I got new boots yesterday that are very nice. I’m not used to wearing shoes so much.
• I got my first feedback for the book today, and it was good. The reader picked up on some of the things that I was trying to do, and also some cool things I did without exactly intending to (not literary accidents, but not things that were in t he outline/planning). This is good news.
• The sleeve of my sweater is about 7 inches long, and I’ve already started decreasing more slowly, so that the forearm isn’t too narrow. The worst is over, I’ll be done with it soon. Just in time to start something new.
• Also, g-d, fire the person who came up with rain…

Cheers, and I’ll be a better blogger this afternoon. It’s tea and class time.

1

I was in class today and we were talking about cognitive categorization heuristics, with relationship to various similar phenome sounds (voiced verses unvoiced consonants ie. /d/ vs. /t/ or /w/ vs. /v/). But the professor referenced the example of a talk that a visiting professor gave the previous semester regarding the limits of intelligibility of “bisexuality,” because of the difficulty of categorizing the intermediate spaces and non-binary configurations.

Anyway, In the description of this the prof stumbled over the word “heterosexual” or “straight” (I think she was deciding which to say). So of course, I, without looking up from my knitting (I was in a tough spot!) say “The rest of y’all,” drawled out for effect, I think, but I might have resorted to a more Pittsburgh “the rest of yous,” I don’t remember. I think it got a chuckle, but the knitting was more enthralling at the moment.

I’m pretty quiet, and while I’m sure there weren’t a lot of (any?) people who had missed the queer memo, I keep to my self, and my classmates don’t really know who I am, so I felt a little awkward for a moment (it passes quick, thankfully,) when I realized that I had put myself out there in front of a group of people that I don’t really know.

2

In another class we were having a discussion of Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, and adult development and aging. At some point there was a thread of the conversation where the discussion turned to the the connection/impact that relationships had with the aging process.

At this juncture a couple of student talked a little bit about the challenges and impact that being queer had on this thought. Now while the class had a few moments of gratuitous “sharing,” these stories were pretty restrained and totally appropriate. While no one articulated it in these terms I think it’s an interesting issue: queer relationships aren’t the same as straight ones, and perhaps the lack of institutionalized marriage exposes the fallacy of long term monogamy, or something. I dunno, there’s a paper in there for someone, but in any case, while I might have nodded and smiled along, I didn’t really say anything, despite sort of wanting to “join rank.” as it were. Which felt almost as awkward as the moment in the first class.

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A video of Alcor (identity revealed, news at 10) Talking about quicksilver, how it’s constructed, history, the future, and some stuff about UI stuff that I think is really cool, mostly because I’m a geek, but you knew that.

Also, he’s cute, but you probably knew I would say that because I’m just that predictable.

I have to say, that I think quicksilver is probably the marker of the “real” mac geek. We might not all use it all the time, but most of us have it and know about it.

I have to admit that I’ve been using it less of late, though that’s started to change. There are a lot of things that I’ve found are just easier to manage in other ways. For instance, I have two “append to specific files” shell scripts that are aliased in my shell for appending to my todo lists and my “collection notebook” which I find is a lot easier than using quicksilver, and I’ve gotten into a place where I’m only using a very small number of programs: Adium, MarsEdit, TextMate, and Mail for most things, with NetNewsWire, Camino, and Preview reading/displaying content. I don’t really use iTunes on a day to day basis, which was one of those things that quicksilver controls really well.

Anyway.

Cheers!

tycho got new boots today (and inserts, because of his crazy high arches).

In other news, tycho also sent the aforementioned novella draft-portion to a couple of readers for initial impressions, just to make sure that I didn’t talk about my feet.

It’s a fear I have, you know you spend lots of time writing something and then you read it six months later, only to discover that you were writing about your feet the whole time, and didn’t notice.

Also, no new headphone cord, I’m thinking about putting a set of noise canceling bluetooth headphones on my list of crap that I should get at some later point.

Anyway, I’m going to go shower and try and write some more, because I’m in a pretty good mood.

Because, you know, somethings need to rewatched from time to time.

A blog about writing. I just wanted to catalogue some accomplishments and statistics about my fiction writing project).

My Novella project, (working title: Knowing Mars, I suppose now it’s big enough to be called by it’s name, without worry about jinxing it,) has reached the 10k word mark, with three chapters completed. Based on my outline, which through no fault of my own I’m sticking to pretty well, I’m at the one-thrid mark.

Chapters take between 7 and 12 days to finish, basically two or two and a half weeks depending on how my writing time works out.

I think I’m going to send this chunk on to a couple of first readers while I outline chapter 4 in depth and work on a short story, for some change.