Let’s DEWEY This! – the 400s

Perhaps it comes with being a writer, but I’m a big fan of language. Learning a new word gives my brain a little hopskip of happy. Give me your nouns, your adjectives! Your portmanteaus, your puns! I want them all!

So I was glad to see that section 400 in my Dewey Decimal Discovery Project would be alllll about language. One of my most favorite things in the world (allow me to slip on my nerd hat – ahh, there) is unexpectedly discovering how one word relates to another word. Like, there’s a word you’ve barely thought about before, and suddenly you notice its obscure prefix is the same as another seemingly irrelevant term and OH MY CHOMSKY THOSE WORDS ARE LONG-LOST SIBLINGS AAAHHH. 😀

That is why, for this month’s nonfiction read, I chose Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs, by Katherine Barber, DD# 422 – a collection of various assorted SUNDRY (oooh yeah that’s a good one) word origins. Here were the most fascinating:

The Watching Man, now up at The J. J. Outre Review

My fifth publication is one that I’d been submitting for more than a year, so I’m BEYOND THRILLED to see it finally find a home. They really mean it when they say persistence is key!

In this creepy suspense tale, a lurker takes people-watching a bit too far and sees something he shouldn’t have seen…

Please check it out here!

100k!

Look at that shiny, glorious number! Can’t you just see the heavenly light rays bursting between its digits? And nope, there’s nothing wrong with your Spotify – that IS a chorus of angels singing “Hallelujah” through this picture. (I hired them to do that and they’d like a tip, so…)

She is Not a Dancer

To anyone else, this is what they would call her, but she does not think of herself this way. She is not a dancer. She is just a person with a body, a body that writes words on the air, words and sentences and full manuscripts in a language she cannot decode but that she knows in her guts. And others know it too, because when they read it something rips and flaps open inside them, and they think, Yes. I understand. Anyone could write this language, because we all have bodies. The only difference between herself and others is they prefer her penmanship over their own.

I call it… “Le Rejection”

I wish my rejections came in old-fashioned letter form, like in the good ol’ days, so I could make a papier mache sculpture representing my despair. Working with my hands always makes me feel better.

Haha, it’s okay, I’m not actually despairing right now, but I have my moments. I know how the publishing industry works, how long it takes even for the most talented writers, that even J.K. Rowling got rejections up to her eyeballs. I know all that, but I still wake up sometimes with a weight on my chest and think, “It’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.”