Vocabulary Building: Chary

I was reading though a document about a specific dog breed and came upon a phrase that I thought was a typo. The description said the dogs were, "chary of strangers." I figured this should have been "wary" but I looked up the word just in case. And it turns out, chary is a valid word!

Unlike a lot of English words, it doesn't come to us from a foreign language. The root of this word is the Old English caru, meaning sorrow. The word is related to "care."

Chary means "discreetly cautious," vigilant, or slow to accept or give something (as compliments or praise.) It could be used as a synonym for prudent, careful, or fastidious.

If you are a person who gets the jitters from drinking too much coffee, you might be chary of drinking several cups of Venti Caramel Macchiato in a single afternoon.

Caution sign by Mike Licht/Flickr CC BY 2.0

Returning After a Break

A great deal has changed in my life over the past few years. I moved once from the city to a small town in the country. And not long afterwards, I moved all the way across the country to settle in another small town nestled in the Kootenay Mountains.

For a long while we were without internet at home, or we were sharing our internet while we were staying with family and getting settled. During that time I wasn't really able to write. I worked on a few odd jobs for a friend who needed extra writers to produce content for her contracts, and I tried my hand at translation as a favour for a colleague. Besides those few projects, I'd really not been writing because too much was going on in the rest of my life. Family became the priority.

Roughly a year ago I took up writing for Bubblews just to make a little spending money. I had a number of friends who were doing well there, and because the site is not very demanding it felt like a good place to get my feet wet again after a long absence. It also proved to be a good introduction to web writing for a couple of friends who had little to no experience as writers!

If you are looking for an easy introduction to web writing, Bubblews is a good place to start. Revenue adds up quickly and the payout is fairly fast once you reach the minimum. At present, it takes roughly two weeks after the minimum of $50 is reached.

Writing can be on almost any topic; even personal journal entries are accepted. Posts must be a mere 400 characters long at minimum, so those who worry they can't find anything to say have nothing to worry about. And even rambling journal entries will get traffic!

If you would like to try your hand at writing online and earn a little money doing it, feel free to sign up using my referral link. Once you arrive at Bubblews you can leave a message for me so I know you're there, and I will pop over to your profile to check out what you're writing about.

Want to check out my Bubblews content? Visit my profile!

U is Not a Word!

I was looking at a Facebook update on the weekend, and for such a short message it had a large number of errors. The kind of errors I would hope most people can see immediately, if they have a decent grasp of the English language. I pointed it out to my husband, who was about as put off by it as I was. It was meant to convey a message about what the individual was doing at that moment in time, but it also told a story about what the person hadn't been doing the past few years. And probably, about what that young person's teachers had been neglecting too.

I know I'm not the only one who appreciates a well crafted turn of phrase. There are still literate people out there who enjoy reading a colourful description. There are still lots of curmudgeons who complain about the mistaken substitution of certain homophones in writing, and who are concerned with how common netspeak has become.

No, "U" is not a word! It's one thing when you are paying for a newspaper ad by the letter, or when you are limited to 140 characters per Tweet. But what about when the abbreviations creep into your other writing? What about when netspeak creeps into your verbal self-expression? Have you ever caught yourself saying "LOL" or "OMG" out loud?

I learned to use abbreviations and self-styled shorthand in high school to take notes. These are useful things, as are the abbreviations that allow people to convey meaning concisely using a Tweet or a text message. I'm not a fan of certain abbreviations, but there are lots that I will use. And hey, I'll gladly add an emoticon where it fits too.

But I am concerned. In this world of electronic everything, autocomplete functions, and fill-in-the-blanks worksheets, are we getting enough practice actually writing out full words and sentences? Do our kids ever do boardwork at school? Do they really learn to write compositions and essays, or are they being taught essentially to cut and paste? Will they remember how to write something out longhand when it matters?

College professors complain that we have an entire generation of high school graduates who can't do simple arithmetic without a calculator. how many of these same young people similarly can't construct a sentence or a paragraph, don't know how to write a business letter, and think that "U" is a word?

My daughter was saying the other day that she doubts a certain public figure would respond if she wrote to him, so I told her to send him a letter and see what happens. Her response was, "I don't know how to write a letter."

Time to get out the writing pad! If I'm going to complain about it, I'd best be doing something to fix the problem too. It's time to review letter writing skills with my girls...

I'm blogging my way from Z to A in May!
You can find my "V" post at The Special Needs Family.

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Z is for Zed, and I'm Not Giving It Up!

I began my education in Southern Ontario, where teachers regularly chastised students for the use of American spelling and where the letter z was most definitely pronounced "zed."

Moving to Quebec after five years of singing God Save the Queen at school assemblies and learning that "practice" is a noun and "practise" is a verb, I found "zed" was one of the few things I had in common with my classmates. It even came in handy when I tackled the job of catching up on five years of French classes in one semester. With the strange pronunciations of some letters and the interchanging of g/j and the fact that "ee" was an i, at least there was one letter in the French alphabet whose name I already knew!

Izzard

Those who think of "zee" as the dominant pronunciation may be surprised to learn that most of the English speaking world says "zed." Pronunciation in many other languages is close, often something like "zet" or "zeta." But the letter has gone by a number of other names in its history, including "izzard." Speakers of some English dialects may be familiar with this word for its use in the expression, "from A to izzard." The meaning is intuitive: a large collection of things; the whole of something. We have a full range of products to fill your needs, from A to izzard.

A similar expression is, "to know A from izzard." It could easily replace a more common idiom, which compares one's rear end to one's elbow. He has no idea what he's doing. He doesn't know A from izzard. It's a colourful expression that would be fun to incorporate into your writing.

American Origin?

If you were thinking "zee" originated in the United States, I'm sorry to have to disappoint you. The alternative pronunciation apparently was in use in at least one region of England in the 17th century, and would have come to North America with speakers of that particular dialect. You may also be surprised to learn that z wasn't always the last letter of the alphabet. It was borrowed into Latin from the Greeks, who placed it near the beginning of their alphabet. The Semitic zayin, origin of the Greek zeta, also comes closer to the beginning.

American Pronunciation Overcoming the Zed?

And what of the suggestion that the pronunciation favoured by Americans is suppressing the use of "zed" in Canada and other countries? I am one of the first to bemoan the fact that today's school teachers commonly fail to use, let alone teach, standard Canadian English. But it seems that at least where zed is concerned, Canadians are holding fast to their language.

Linguist Jack Chambers writes that the zee/zed controversy has been with us since at least 1846. He describes the use of "zee" by Canadian youth as an age-graded change, which repeats itself over successive generations. The trend is for young people to adopt the use of "zed" as they get older. There is no overall decline of "zed," nor any increase in the use of "zee" in the population Chambers studied.

In other words, younger Canadian children may prefer "zee" because of their exposure to it through popular songs and educational TV produced the US. But as a population, we drop "zee" in favour of "zed" as we mature.

This content is copyrighted. Please feel free to share by sending others a link to this page, or contact the author about purchasing reprint rights.

Honing Your Writing - How to Write on the Cutting Edge

I'm working my way through Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card as I revise my novel. The book is part of the Elements of Fiction Writing series, and I ordered it at a time when I was struggling to really the unique voices of the characters in my book.

As luck would have it, my muse kicked in just after I placed the order and I had pretty much resolved my voice issues by the time the book arrived a few days later. Because I enjoyed Card's fiction I decided to browse my way through the book anyway.

I'm glad I didn't immediately relegate it to the bookshelf. Thumbing through a few pages here and there has been helpful. Card is forcing me to reconsider details such as point of view, that I had probably decided in too much of a hurry when I sat down to write the first draft.

I still haven't made any life altering decisions - or at least decisions that would lead to a global rewrite! But I'm toying with individual scenes, reading more of Card's advice, and giving myself time to think about how I can best communicate my characters and their story to the reader.

Every few days I stumble on advice I hadn't expected to find in a book on characters. A good example is this passage about writing conventions, and how too many writers feel obliged to write something unconventional if they want to be taken seriously:

There are many young writers . . . who believe that good writing must be unconventional, challenging, strange . . .

This is far from the truth. Most great writers followed all but a few of the conventions of their time. Most wrote very clearly, in the common language of their time; their goal was to be understood. Indeed, Dante and Chaucer were each the starting point of a national literature precisely because they refused to write in an arcane language that nobody understood, and instead wrote in the vernacular, so that people could receive their stories and poetry in words they used every day.

It is often said that Shakespeare wrote his plays in the vernacular of his time, but I wonder how many of us would think the same of more challenging authors like Chaucer. This message will probably take a while to percolate into the minds of aspiring writers, precisely because works that have achieved the status of "classics" were generally written in an English that differs from our own. But as Card says, language evolves and so do the expectations of the reader.

We need to write for today's reader. The goal isn't to dazzle the reader with great feats of linguistic prowess, but to make our words seem so natural they are almost invisible. Then what shines through is the story we want to tell. As Card puts it, "Choose the simplest, clearest, least noticeable technique that will accomplish what the story requires." If you want to be on the cutting edge of writing, I suspect this is the place you'll find it.

This content is copyrighted. Please feel free to share by sending others a link to this page, or contact the author about purchasing reprint rights.

Business Resources for Freelancers

Angie Mohr's business e-book bundle is still available, for anyone who works as a freelance writer or is thinking about setting up a freelancing business. An accountant and freelancer herself, Angie offers advice on setting up your business and keeping financial records, as well as on preparing your taxes and even dealing with copyright infringement.

The bundle contains two e-books: Managing a Freelance Writing Business and Tax Preparation & Planning for Freelance Writers. There is also a set of spreadsheets you can use to track revenues, expenses and writing projects.

The entire freelancing e-book bundle is available for the price of US$25, of which three dollars goes to support writer Rissa Watkins in her fight against leukemia. If you haven't already taken advantage of the offer, I hope you'll take the time to head over to Angie's web site and learn more about this useful resource. With taxes due in the coming weeks, this is a great time to make an investment in your writing career.

Business Resources for Freelancers by Kyla Matton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Photo of Angie Mohr from writingandsellingnonfictionbooks.blogspot.com, used with permission.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.kylawrites.com/p/contact.html.

Kyla the Grammar Cop: Vertebrae vs Vertebra

I am not much of a sports fan, but you'd have to live under a rock not to know that Montreal Canadiens forward Max Pacioretty was seriously injured in a home game against Boston this week. Pacorietty spent several minutes unconscious on the ice Tuesday night, and remains in hospital today with a concussion and a spinal fracture.

I'm not going to comment on how the incident that caused the injury  is being handled by the police or the NHL. I was actually spurred to write this post because of how many times I've cringed when I heard someone official use the wrong word when describing Pacorietty's spinal injury. Every single report I heard on TV featured at least one person saying the hockey player had suffered "a fractured vertebrae."

OK, time for me to put on my grammar cop helmet! Please people, could we say "a fractured vertebra"? Please???

"Vertebrae" is the plural of "vertebra" — just like "antennae" is the plural of "antenna." It's an unusual construct in English, I know. But in Latin, some plurals end in -ae, and some of those words have been borrowed into our language. It's one of those things we have to learn to do correctly, if we want to improve our use of English.

The good news is that all the text I found relating to the hockey injury correctly used the singular form "a fractured vertebra." And I'm willing to bet that all those news anchors and sportscasters saw "vertebra" on their prompters too. With so many folks getting the word wrong, perhaps some got confused and others just decided it was safer to go along with the crowd.

This content is copyrighted. Please feel free to share by sending others a link to this page, or contact the author about purchasing reprint rights.

Dialect: What's a 'punter'?

I'm listening to my morning news show while I get ready for the day, and the weatherman mentions a headline that reads, "Brit punter wins tickets, wins jackpot."

The weatherman and one of the anchorwomen are both big sports fans, so of course they both found the use of the word punter interesting. But this story has nothing to do with football, he explains: A punter is a gambler. He adds that he hopes he hasn't just said anything offensive to folks who speak British English.

New Flash Fiction eZine

Are you familiar with flash fiction?

It's a phenomenon that might sound new to you, but it really isn't. Flash fiction is a special kind of short story. Usually it is defined by how many words are used.

Rissa Fights Leukemia - Writers Helping Writers

A colleague of mine was diagnosed this week with Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, otherwise known as ALL. My friends - my writing family, really - at the Yahoo! Content Network have mobilized to help raise funds for Rissa Watkins' medical bills and living expenses. Rissa has not been able to work while doctors were trying to sort out what was wrong, and now she's been diagnosed she faces a period of difficult treatments and astronomical bills that her insurance will only partially cover.

Facebook Numbers Game: A Writer's Perspective

Writers, especially freelance and content writers, often spend a lot of time online promoting their work. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites can be powerful tools - but too often our friends and family mistake our use of these sites for fooling around. Here's an example of a Facebook game that offers serious benefits to writers who play:

Facebook numbers game develops writing skills
Writers of all kinds use writing challenges and prompts to help develop our writing skills, and this game is a good example of a challenge that demands we hone these skills. The Facebook numbers in status game is a challenge: receive a concealed number from a known contact, then write in just a few sentences what you think of that person.

Read more...

NaNoWriMo - Day 4

Still behind today, after a restless morning and an afternoon pondering how to handle an educational matter.

I had intended to start writing early, while the girls and their Dad were out at Ju-Jutsu. I ended up helping the boy with his homework.

I didn't get started until late tonight, and I'm literally falling asleep as I write. Hopefully I'll get to work on my novel tomorrow morning, because I have company coming by in the afternoon.

Good night all!

NaNoWriMo - Day 3

After two days of staying ahead of my goal, I've fallen behind. It's OK. I had a productive day in several other ways, and I spent a good part of the day with friends.

My word count is now 4,136 words, where I should be just over 5,000 (6,668 by midnight, tonight.) As you can see from the graphic, I'm sleepy at the moment. I'm going to take a quick nap, and hopefully
I'll wake up with a good bit of energy.

I'm going to echo the advice of fellow writer Jennifer Walker: if you're doing NaNoWriMo make sure to write something every day. Even if life gets on the way you'll feel better if you can dash out a few words!

NaNoWriMo - Day 2

Work continues! I was able to update some floor plans for the house where my protagonist lives, and then I sat and wrote another 1723 words.That puts me ahead for a second day, but only just slightly.

According to the NaNo progress meter, wrimos like me in Montreal have written 557,276 words so far. How are you doing?

Happy writing!

NaNoWriMo - Day 1

So I'm tackling NaNoWriMo this year! I signed up last year with the best of intentions, but then life got in the way and I never ended up writing a single word. This year is going better, already.

I didn't have as much time to outline my novel as I would have liked, but this particular story is one I've been mulling over for a few years now. I managed to put a rough outline together, and I took time to revamp a couple of the characters. I also dropped the original setting (a real town) and am creating a fictitious town in a slightly different location, based loosely on the real town but with a history I've cobbled together from real and imagined events.

I am not nearly finished with my outlining, but was able to go ahead with my first day of writing anyway. As you can see from the neat graphic above, I wrote 1915 words today, which means one successful day and also one day in which I surpassed my goal of 1667 words.

I am building the outline in layers, loosely following Randy Ingermanson's snowflake method. I like the way one layer of work builds upon the previous layer, and then contributes to the next one.

For those who are interested in the technical mechanics of writing (the act of recording the words, not the composition itself) I'm using a book writing template produced for OpenOffice. I had originally considered getting software made for writing fiction, but so far this seems quite adequate and it's also free! I've tweaked the template styles slightly, and added extra details into the sections for characters, settings and items. I also added a to do list at the very beginning.

It was a good day, but I'm not done yet. I'm off to work on some of those details that need filling in, and then it's supper with the family.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo and want to add me as a writing buddy, you can find me at ruby3881. Happy novel writing!

A Little Blog Test

I've been able to upload and link to certain types of files from a blog, but a friend just asked if it was possible to upload a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet for her readers to download. I wasn't sure if Blogger allowed for this, so I figured I would test it out.

So here I am in Blogger composing a new post, and I'm looking for a place to upload a text. I can insert an image or a video, but don't see a place for uploading a file. Do you? (In theory, you should be able to click on these images to enlarge them. Unfortunately, Blogger seems to have shrunk them in the upload process. I apologize if it's hard to make out the details.)

I figured I could try uploading the doc as an image, but that was rejected right away.

In the end, the only way I could figure to link to a downloadable file was to upload the file to an outside server, or to use another blogging platform. WordPress does allow media uploads, including several kinds of word processing files. I was pleased to see the *.odt format used by OpenOffice was among them! Here's a peek at how it works if I wanted to offer a file for download from my WordPress writing blog:

Bitten By the Blogging Bug :)

Being part of a community of writers is a great way to stay motivated and to share resources. My community at Associated Content is  one of those where members also get each other moving. It’s a very gentle thing, even when a challenge grows from a few comments in a forum post or a Facebook status to something more official. But it usually has the effect of setting a bunch of us off on some writing adventure together.

In July of 2010 we all caught a blogging bug. Those who had never blogged before learned what blogs are and how to write one. Those of us who had been neglecting our blogs for other kinds of writing returned to our blogs, or perhaps started new ones.

In my case, I ended up creating several niche blogs and really giving the Blogger platform a fair shake. I was also inspired to write some articles on blogging for other writers, and as I create this page that work is underway. If the topics interest you, I hope you’ll pop by and read one or more of them.

Writing Blogs

Ruby Writer: The blog you are currently reading, and the place where you can learn more about my writing

Read Write Up: A secondary writing blog at Blogger, which offers different features and has different rules on what content can be displayed. In all likelihood, I will probably merge the two blogs and buy a domain for the resulting writing blog.

Education Blogs

The Character of Education: A look at what public education is and should be; philosophy of education, alternative education and homeschooling; educational policy

Education in Montreal: Topics of interest to students, parents and educators in Montreal and the province of Quebec
 
Homeschool Writer: General topics for those interested in home-based education

Homeschooling in Quebec: Topics of interest to home educators in the Montreal area, and throughout Quebec

School Days: Resources and tips; mainly for parents, but students and classroom teachers may also find it useful

Blogs About Home & Family

Canaduceus: Topics in health care, conditions and diseases, health and wellness from one Canadian’s point of view

Cooking à la Canadienne: History of foods; recipes from Quebec, Canada & elsewhere; tips for food buying & preparation. This blog will run from meal starters and once a month cooking (OAMC) to cooking for picky eaters and people with special needs.

Just Desserts: The politics of food & housing; social justice; sharing our bounty & surviving on a fixed income
 
Parenting in the 21st Century: The challenges of contemporary parenting

The Special Needs Family: Resources for families of special needs children; as I have personal experience with autism spectrum disorders and ADHD, these will be more frequently discussed

Blogs on Other Diverse Topics

Au Tournant des Saisons: Celebrating the turning of the seasons

Between the Worlds: Personal reflections on earth-based religion

Coffee with Kyla: A bit more of a catch-all blog; arts and entertainment, books, recipes, reviews

Wild Thyme Blows: An odd little blog about oral traditions, recitation and the lore of flowers and herbs

Most of these blogs are quite new, so I hope you will be patient as I add content to each of them. I will make an effort to keep an up to date listing at Ruby Writer, so if there are any changes they should appear there.

This post was originally published at Ruby Writer, the sister blog to Read Write Up.

Help for Non-Fiction Publishers

My oldest and dearest friend, Angie Mohr, is the author of the Numbers 101 for Small Business series of books. In her blog Writing & Selling Non-Fiction Books she discusses the ins and outs of the publishing business, with a specific focus on non-fiction writing. In a series of articles "Negotiating a Non-Fiction Book Contract," Angie discusses the process of negotiating with a non-fiction publisher. Teaching from personal experience, she offers accessible advice that writers can use to get the most out of a contract.

Here's an excerpt from the second article in the series, which discusses how writers can avoid getting locked into a contract where a publisher reserves rights for different formats, markets or foreign language editions and then does not exploit those rights to the writer's advantage.

Reading over a book publishing contract can be a daunting task for many first-time authors. Knowing what rights your contract grants the publisher, however, can mean the difference of thousands of dollars over time.

Here's what you need to know about the grant of rights section in your publishing contract:

Read more...

Photo: Daniel Jaeger Vendruscolo, sxc.hu

Using Twitter to Promote Your Writing

Twitter Buttons

Search engine optimization is emphasized on many writing sites. A lot of writers will say they get the majority of their page views from Google searches, among others. But social media does contribute to page views as well. Many writing sites offer promotion tips that make use of sites like Facebook and Twitter, Digg, Technorati or others. It is not uncommon for sites to also offer tools that will automatically post links to these sites for a writer, or that encourage readers to "share" on one of a number of sites.

Despite the encouragement, not all writers are yet comfortable with social networking sites. Privacy is one concern that is frequently cited, but it may also be that the writer feels a little put off by a new and unfamiliar technology. Some of us perhaps feel we must become attached to our mobile devices at the thumbs in order to become part of the Twitterverse. Or maybe the question, "What are you doing right now?" just seems a little too invasive...

Read more...

The Trappings of a Writer

When I was about the age my oldest daughter is now, I fell in love with writing paper. There were all sorts of little writing kits in the stores then - note cards, little cardboard folios with matching paper and envelopes, citrus scented paper decorated with oranges and lemons, faux antique paper with Hobby Holly in four different poses. I must have had half a dozen sets at any given time. Oh, and don't even get me started on the blank, fabric-covered "anything books" that turned up a few years later!

Photo by Chris Wightman Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

It seems most of us eschew the old pen & paper methods now. It's rare to use snail mail unless you're sending a package. We email, text & Facebook each other. Writers use a word processor. People keep electronic calendars and to do lists. Some people are even using electronic wedding invitations these days.

But there's no getting away from the trappings, even with our electronic platforms. In fact, maybe it's become more of a distraction than ever. Be honest, have you ever wanted to get some writing done but instead ended up spend an hour browsing through new blog templates and updating your layout so everything looked just right? Have you ever come back a week later, only to redo the whole thing again because the new template is even better than the last one was? I bet you have!

 The trappings of writing are still with us. They are no longer bottles of ink and crisp sheets of paper, but at times they seem almost as tangible. And if they help us get the job done, why complain?