The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Do you ever experience vellichor — that strange wistfulness of used bookshops? Being surrounded by books that have lived other lives can cause a bit of melancholy. Or have you ever had a jouska — that hypothetical conversation that you play out in your head? The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows includes dozens of these spectacular words with equally spectacular definitions such as chrysalism: “the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.”

Who thinks up these words? I pulled out my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary to see if I could find where some of these words came from. I wasn’t successful with the few I tried. Maybe they’re too recent. But wherever they came from, these words would be difficult to throw into the middle of a conversation at a cocktail party. (Do people still have cocktail parties?) I’m experiencing exulansis so I am just going to give up trying to tell my story about swimming across the Atlantic Ocean. People just can’t relate to it!

One of my favorites is Nodus Tollens which is the realization that the plot of your life just doesn’t make sense to you anymore. I mean seriously! How often have you felt that way? In the dictionary there are clues to the derivation.

Directly from the dictionary:

aftersome

adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

From the Swedish ‘eftersom’ because.

agnosthesia

n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

From Greek ‘agnostos’ unknown + ‘diathesis’ mood.

Words are amazing! There are so many of them that we’ll never get to know.

Wonderful Words

Sometimes a word in a book looks wrong, like a misspelling, like the copy editor made a mistake. And sometimes it is. But there are a huge number of wonderful words in the English language that we rarely run across. Chirk is a word like that.
“He emerged from the water, surged ahead, and caught up to her. Grabbing her, she chirked, emitting a happy high-pitched squeal.”
Chirk means to make a shrill, chirping sound.
Or how about mephitic: “Some of the players were returning to their cars, lugging bags filled with mephitic athletic attire.”

My son played football in high school and when he would climb into the car with that huge bag of sweaty jerseys and socks and the cowboy collar, the air in the car reeked for days even with all the windows open.
Procacious means insolent or arrogant in attitude or tone. “The twin, sloped, two-color taillights procaciously blended into the small tail fins on either side of the curving top of the tiny trunk, barely large enough to hold the spare tire.” This is part of the description of Jon Megquire’s MG Midget.

These are a couple of excerpts from my latest novel, Death At the Edge of the Diamond. Sometimes these words just seem to appear. Sometimes they come from Roget’s Thesaurus - a truly wonderful reference. I haven’t been able to make an electronic thesaurus work half as well.

Sometimes an author is just showing off and doesn’t truly appreciate the words he or she is messing around with. I might have found a simpler word than procacious, for example, but I was trying to evoke the almost sexual attraction of a first car to a new driver.

Sometimes a word is just wrong, misspelled or misused. A good copy editor will pick up most of these minor typos, but good copy editors are expensive and most self-published authors can’t afford them so unfortunately many hurriedly printed books even from reputable publishing houses have typos in them. Personally I think that this is strongly influenced by fast fingering small keyboards and reliance on auto-correct.

“If you read Death at the Edge of the Diamond carefully you may uncover other interesting words. If you send me what you find, I’ll put you on my list for a free, signed copy of my next book!”

— Paul H. Raymer

Part 3 - Entering The Self-Publishing Jungle

Chances are good that you’re not going to write your novel with a quill pen, dipping it into a bottle of ink, and scratching the letters on parchment. Most people write on computers these days. So how do you do it?

You can use software such as Microsoft Word or something similar. That’s great software with lots of capabilities that most of us never use. (One thing I have found useful is to use the Style menu and convert titles and subtitles into Heading 1, 2, or 3 and then use the Navigation pane. It will automatically make a list of all those elements and when you are ready for a table of contents, it can automatically do all that for you.)

There is writer’s word processing software, however. Now there may be others, but I have been using Scrivener from Literature and Latte https://www.literatureandlatte.com/ . This thing will do everything a writer might need. It does so many things that it takes a bit to get familiar with it. It does have some good tutorials, however.

When I’m working on my novel, I can go to the Notes section and set up a Diary where I can jot down all my developmental thoughts. There are template sheets for Characters and Settings. You can outline sections and pin them to the virtual cork board and more them around. I can load in images of scenes I am working on and put that in the background and remove everything else so I can just focus on the things I am interested in and don’t get distracted. You can save whole web pages in the reference section and download music to play while you’re working. You can set project targets to keep you pushing forward if you need a bit of a shove.

It has great editing features as well that allow you to split the screen while you’re work, cut things out but keep them available in case you want to put them back, and it goes on and on. I confess that I have trouble remembering all the features of the software that I use if I don’t use it every day. But this thing is worth learning and relearning if necessary.

There is a separate Scapple program that allows me to diagram the plot elements and connect them together.

It’s not expensive - $49 for Scrivener and $18 for Scapple. It was originally just for the Mac OS, but there is a Windows version. I bought that too a few years ago but at that time it was as satisfactory. They may have improved it.

And once your draft is complete, you can compile it and move over to Word if you need to. Then you can start cleaning it up for pre-readers to review.

#deathattheedgeofthediamond

#CapeCodNovel

Have you added Death at the Edge of the Diamond to your reading list yet? Check it out and add it to your Goodreads shelf

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54473532-death-at-the-edge-of-the-diamond

Part 2 - Entering The Self-publishing Jungle - Editing

So there you are with this pile of electronic pages that you think is pretty good. The next step is to find out if it is any good and to sweep up all the typos, misspellings, mis-punctuations, and all the other detritus that falls out of your brain and onto the page as you squeeze the words out. It is absolutely shocking how many mistakes we make as we write. No matter how many times you go over and over it, these little errors hide in corners and camouflage themselves into what look like what should be there.

Anyway that’s what editors are for. Editors and beta readers. Beta readers are usually friends and family. Couple of things there: you can’t push them if they’re free. Maybe they’ll get to reading it. Maybe they won’t. They have the best intentions, but they do have other lives! Believe it or not your book is not at the top of their to-do list. And that’s certainly fair. Beta readers are also encouraging. At least someone besides you has read the book.

Editors are paid to find all the gotcha’s as well as a lot of other stuff depending on what kind of editor you hire. So that’s like the first professional decision you have to make: Do I need to pay an editor and how much can I afford and will they make it all better? No. They won’t. It’s my book. I’m not perfect, but I should know what I’m doing otherwise I shouldn’t be spending all this time pushing these buttons.

Well not necessarily. When I was in school, and the teacher used his red pen on all my words, and disagreed with my literary analogies, I couldn’t ignore them or he’d fail me. But when I am paying someone, I don’t have to pay attention to their comments. Their observations may very well be right, but they might be wrong. Imagine editing James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

There are a lot of different kinds of editors. The website Elite Authors has some good information on the subject.

Developmental editors delves deeply into the story and can make significant changes.

Line editors pursue the basic writing mechanics and strengthen the higher level elements.

Copy editing editors focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation. The book should be ready for the final launch.

Proofreaders read the final, laid-out PDF.

A good editor has to be able to tell you when something sucks . . . in a nice way . . . in a constructive way that makes you understand it. I have to confess that although I had some great editorial input on Death at the Edge of the Diamond I haven’t found my long-term developmental editor for the next one.