spelling

Silly Sunday – Words Weird and Wonderful

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 20 Comments

JUST WORDS, NO PICTURES…

DO YOU EVER HEAR A WORD ON TELEVISION OR RADIO, EVEN ON THE NEWS AND THINK IS THAT ACTUALLY A REAL WORD?

Coronated? What happened to Crowned? But then how did the crowning event turn into a coronation?

CIRCUMAMBULATION? CAN’T YOU JUST SAY CIRCLING? It does especially mean walking round a sacred object in a ceremony.

Do you ever write down words then forget the context or what they mean?

Encirculate? Who on earth said this. Probably not a real word, a search comes up with encircle.

Fabulate – to tell a tall tale.

Reheterosexualised – I can only find heterosexualised – which I think can be taken to mean that it is assumed that when you get old or need to stay in a care home it is assumed you revert to being heterosexual. When I came across reheterosexualised it referred to family reinventing the life of the deceased loved one to reclaim them as heterosexual.

Now for words easier on the tongue…

FURTLE – When I heard someone on Gardeners’ Question Time ( BBC RADIO 4 ) talk about furtling around in the compost heap, I knew exactly what she meant and was keen to use it in my writing. ‘To gently delve; to probe or rummage tentatively.’

Metafiction – I confess I had to look this up when another cleverer blogger used the word in a comment on one of my stories. ‘Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work.’

Today on the radio they were talking about a trend in France to become part time farmers to get away from stressful jobs in the city. The commentator used a phrase I wished I had thought of, though I might well use it for one of my characters….’Those of us who are purveyors of words and tabulations will see the attraction of escaping to a farm.

Have you seen or heard any unusual words lately, or even better, invented some yourself?

Silly Saturday – Word Blitz Worries

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 6 Comments

My name is Tidalscribe and I am a Word Blitz Addict.

Of course that is not my real name, we don’t give our real names at the Word Blitz Support Group. I might be able to wean myself off this demonic word game; after all, there was the time I was obsessed with Quiz Planet – perhaps no one wanted to play with me any more, that’s how I came off it. But Word Blitz is stopping me writing or reading blogs and if I pick up my phone or go on the computer and find nobody has played their round, that it is not yet my turn to play again, I am filled with irrational rage disappointment, I need a round before I can check my emails or write a flash fiction.

‘Word Blitz is an action-packed word game where you can face off against your friends and other players. Form words from letters randomly arranged on the playing field. Play every word you can find and get the most points! Don’t forget the bonus fields to step your points up a notch!’

I don’t actually understand the tactics or the scoring and I certainly have no idea who I am playing with; the whole world or friends I actually know in real life, the ones that got me trapped in the first place. I am too busy trying to make words out of sixteen letters, before the time runs out, to have a battle plan. Using X seems to be good, so does having SEX.

The best thing about playing the game on your phone is the annoying ping it makes every time you get a word, delightfully irritating for anyone nearby. But alas, they get their revenge by interrupting you. Word Blitz requires your full attention and there is no time for interaction with human beings or pets. If you are playing against me, the reason for my bad score is not poor brain power or lack of hand eye coordination, but inconsiderate ringing of the doorbell or house phone or inconsiderate inane utterings of humans or dogs.

Do any of you out there need help. Word Blitz is not the only mind pandemic. There are people who have been playing the same scrabble game on line for years, unable to stop…

Silly Saturday – Careful How You Comment

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 34 Comments

Bloggers love to recieve comments; especially ones that go like this…

Terrific post, I would really like to go there, your photographs are fantastic. ps. I have just downloaded your latest novel.

68992795_510789399686468_7007681013954379776_n

But comments can go horribly wrong, especially if you decide to check your social media on your smart phone, on a bus stopping and starting in traffic or on the back of a motorbike. I often do the former, haven’t tried the latter. The combination of predictive texting and hitting the wrong letters can lead to disaster.

Hollow Join i rea11y lived your block. i wouldlove to sieve thatport of rhe wwwwwwwwwwwwwprlf. i hive donwlodads you’re knew book and will rewrite my will.

43339936_2314736698556107_1098449997759774720_o

Here is a handy guide to commenting on your favourite bloggers. First make sure you are sitting comfortably and unlikely to be disturbed,  otherwise you could end up writing ‘Coffee please’ -‘Don’t forget to get bread’ – ‘I’ll be finished in half an hour’ or ‘Who was that at the door?’

67802808_1921618381274043_2615444781853048832_n

There are just four standard comments you will need.

Beautiful pictures, thanks for the wonderful tour. – Use for anything from blogger’s own garden to The Great Lakes.

You’re so right, if only everyone saw things the same way. – Use for opinions expressed on everything from Brexit to Climate Change.

Fantastic book review, sounds like a great series. – Use when someone else’s novel is being reviewed.

Thanks so much for the wonderful review, Reblogged…  – Use in the unlikely event that it is your book being reviewed.

sunshine-blogger

What is the strangest place you have followed social media from?

 

 

George Had Six Mouths To Feed.

~ tidalscribe.com ~ 1 Comment

After nearly five years floating in the ether, the first novel I published on Amazon Kindle is now available as a paperback. Quarter Acre Block was inspired by my family’s experiences emigrating to Australia as Ten Pound Pommies; ironically the paperback costs £10.00  (£9.99 ).  I have not yet written a novel inspired by my return to the United Kingdom, as a twenty year old on a six month working holiday which has stretched till now; suffice to say I have family on both sides of the world and there have been many journeys back and forth over the years, few of them mine.

Project Paperback QAB took on some urgency as Australian visitors were coming to stay; Kindle Direct Publishing paperbacks are not yet available in Canada or Australia.

Technology at our In House Publishers is rarely new; second hand computers, smart phones and other devices pass through the house, passed down from family who are upgrading or bought from ‘Pete at work’. Quarter Acre Block documents were in my new computer, in the external hard drive and on various memory sticks, but we couldn’t find the HTML document that had formed the original Kindle book. I wanted to add pages at the beginning and end that could not have existed in the first version, ‘By the same author’  ‘About The Author’, so with my Kindle at my side as reference I treated the Microsoft word document as a final edit. It was good to read the novel again and the Palmer family were pleased I had not forgotten them, but I was mortified to find more than one mistake in spelling and grammar. Had gremlins crept in? There was no escaping the fact that the same errors occurred in the Kindle version.  I am not alone in this, I have enjoyed plenty of e-books where letters have swapped places and full stops have fallen off; perfection is hard to achieve, but it was galling to read that George had six ‘moths’ to feed.

At last the book was ready to download, with a new cover and perfect pages. Before you press Publish, Amazon comes up with a helpful spell check, a feature not available when we first published. Six errors… four were colloquial, wheatbelt should have been The Wheatbelt, but the glaring mistake was Goerge. One of my main characters, George, had endured the indignity of having his name spelt incorrectly in the first chapter; I can only hope that like the jumbled letter quizzes on Facebook – only people who are highly intelligent can read this – readers did not notice.

We ordered one copy to check it was fine. The visitors arrived on Thursday, the book on Friday. I ordered ten more; they were due on Sunday, an e-mail from Amazon on Sunday afternoon stated they had been delivered and left in the porch. The porch was empty, the visitors were going on Tuesday morning. On Sunday evening the neighbours came round with a parcel that had been left in their porch. On Monday evening we gave our visitors their gift and luckily they had enough room in their suitcases to take copies for my mother and niece; at 95,000 words the book is quite heavy, I had saved a lot on postage and packing.

In all the excitement we had not noticed one glaring omission. There was no title on the spine… on Amazon Kindle nothing is set in stone, you can go back in at any time and change the book, future copies will not be spineless. Perhaps those first eleven copies will be famous rarities in a hundred years time…

Read my previous blog on how KDP print on demand first came into my life.     https://wordpress.com/post/tidalscribe.wordpress.com/383