The new year has arrived, very quietly for us. It will be memorable, though for several reasons, starting with our retirement in March, going on to our fortieth anniversary in May, and then our trip to Spain.
The trip arrangements are going well. I found a terrific website called Inns of Spain, and booked hotels in Madrid and Seville. Nick, at Inns of Spain has offered to help if I can’t sort out the trains!
We also booked a villa at Ronda, where a nice lady called Caro will cook us our dinner the first night. Looking at the hotels on Google Earth, especially the street level views, is a lot of fun.
My story, Clarice is up at Gumshoe Review http://www.gumshoereview.com/. It’s a great site and I am very pleased to have Clarice accepted there.
Last year’s writing goal was to get something published, and I have been very happy to have reached it. Looking forward to 2010!
writing
publishing
My short story, Clarice, will be published at the Gumshoe Review, on January 1. This is my first short story accepted by a paying market!
When I started this year, I wanted to submit something every month at least, hoping that would lead to publishing success, and it has. My new goal is to find a print market for my books, while there still are books in paper. To hold in my hand a book that I have written, would be the best.
Winter Writing
Winter has settled in here. Snow days, wind chills in the minus teens, slippery sidewalks, and shivering robins, still hanging around in the crabapple trees when they should be in Georgia or Florida.
It should be a good time for writing, but lately I’ve been focussed on websites and search engine optimization and Google analytics and other such arcane and here-to-fore unknown subjects, all to increase traffic to my website and blog and eventually to sales of my book. Or so I hope.
There appear to be as many people trying to make a dollar from exploitation of a writer’s work online as there are in the print world. I see sites with books by agents and marketers, ezines, selling the surest route to a best seller, if only the author would take an eight hundred dollar course, and oh, bye the way sign up three friends to get fifty per cent off, and others offering to rewrite the opus, and then it would sell millions of copies and be the next Harry Potter.
As I struggle through SEO for Dummies, and Blogging ditto, I wonder what would be wrong with writing just for me. But then I would just have to think, and remember and never write at all. Writing only has value and purpose, to my way of thinking, if shared.
Se’nnight
Se’nnight, a word from Middle English that means a week, seven nights. It was derived from Old English, seafon nihta, and has relatives in many languages including Italian(settimana), French(semaine) and Catalan(setimana).
I first met it in a Rex Stout short story, used, not by the erudite Nero Wolfe, Stout’s polymath main character, but by a low level hood. “Where did you pick that up?” he is asked.
“Oh some wag started it around last summer.”
The Oxford English revised says it is archaic, Middle English(1150-1500), but there are references to its use later than that period.
Dr. Donald Straughan, in directing the transcribers of the Bath Chronicle(1760-1800) for the Georgian Newspaper Project, instructs them that the word is se’nnight, sometimes fe’nnight, and means a week, not a fortnight.
Se’nnight is included in the Emily Dickinson Lexicon for her 19th Century poems, and Virginia Woolf used it in 1928’s Orlando. The Rex Stout short story I mentioned is called Easter Parade and was published in 1957.
Perhaps the old words aren’t dead, just waiting to be rediscovered.
I’ll write again, Sunday se’nnight.
writingthoughts 