Good morning!  Buenos dias!

 

I don’t have any outings planned for today. I did walk to the mini mart first thing this morning to get a few things.  And I have a large order for MasXMenos but their website is hiccuping right now so I can’t get the order to go through.

 

I was going to ride the bus to Grecia this morning to get the balance of my upcoming December rent for my landlady, but then I made a lunch date with Brooke Bishop for another day this week,  so I’ll withdraw the money then.  No need to ride in twice, since I don’t need anything else from town.

 

Spanish Sentences

 

Now that I have a list of Spanish words to commit to memory (taken from the earlier mentioned vocabulary list), I am spending time every day writing sentences using those words,so I have them in a context that will be easier to recall.

 

I’m not absolutely certain I’m getting every single sentence 100% correct, so I’ll use Reverso when I’m finished to check them, but the few I have checked to date have been correct, so I believe most of them will pass muster when I get around to “proofing” them that way.  I don’t want to “Mother Hen”/critique/second guess myself during the sentence-writing process . I want to wing it and see how much I get right without worrying every single sentence to death.

 

WHY THIS MODUS OPERANDI?

 

I learned to do it this way when I taught myself to write.  As a teenager, every time I thought about writing something “for publication” my anxiety would skyrocket so much that I’d have a terrible time putting consecutive sentences down on paper because I wanted the present sentence to be “perfect” before I wrote the next one!  I crippled myself so severely in this way that I never got anything “finished” enough to send it out!

 

And that’s why DeForest Kelley ended up being the one to launch my writing career.  I wrote him a letter including an essay I had written about meeting him for my English class and my teacher had insisted I send it to him because he thought it was so good.  So, I did that and DE sent the essay to the magazine. It was published word-for-word:

 

It took me a long time to learn to send my internal teacher/overlord/tyrant into exile so I could just get in the sandbox and play with words, to put it all down in the way it came from my heart and mind without worrying how good it was until later in the process.   As soon as I was able to evict my internal, infernal Critic, writing became the joy and thrill that it remains to this day.

 

It also helped me write less  pedantically.  It helped me write to express, not to impress.  (Or — in a more pedantic turn of phrase — to communicate, not obfuscate.)

 

K.I.S.S.

 

One of the best suggestions I ever received as  a writer was during a creative writing class at a community college.  The teacher told me, “You have an amazing vocabulary, and important things to convey, but you use terms that the average reader (who reads for information and for pleasure) won’t understand. Use simpler,easier-to-understand words wherever you can.”  (Or, in other words, “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

 

The Suggestion Made Perfect Sense, But…!

 

As a lifelong Mark Twain devotee, I always operated as a writer under the idea that the exact right word, with the exact right meaning, was necessary. WHY? Because my long-dead, honorary mentor Mark Twain had written in no uncertain terms, that “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is  really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.“

 

Alas, Mark Twain lived during an epoch where not all that many people were widely read, but those who were were very well read. They had vocabularies like Twain’s.  He didn’t have to simplify terms for them.  Sadly, this is no longer true.

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PROOF: My sister Jackie told me one time, “I like reading your books because it sounds like you’re just talking to me (the reader). Even when I don’t know some of the words you use, I can figure out what they mean just by the way you use them in a sentence.”

 

(Huh?!)  She graduated from high school, and doesn’t understand some of the words I use?  Is this true when I talk to her face-to-face, too?!  That could answer a lot of questions as to why we aren’t closer. Do our conversations make her feel stupid because I’m more well read and a wordsmith?  And do others experience the same disconnect?  I sure hope not!

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I wasn’t aware until I went back (as an adult) and read Twain that he used terms that today’s readers might have to look up to be able to understand them. To me, even as a teenager, every word he wrote was easily understood, because I had the vocabulary to follow along.  Most people of my age who are eager readers do.

 

This isn’t true of today’s college graduates, even, at least in the United States. They’d have to have a dictionary at their side to read Twain, I’m afraid.  Which is very sad to me, because Twain was, and is, to me one of the best communicators the world has ever known.

 

He could even write in dialects, his ear was so keenly attuned to lingua francas (bridge languages). He captured the languages of enslaved people, landed gentry southerners, French speaking folks, and others. I could never get enough of him.

 

Sure, it took some doing, especially with the enslaved Black dialect, but it was worth the challenge because it helped me get inside their skin,  their experiences, and especially their hearts. (Twain was an abolitionist through and through although he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri among slave-owning men. In fact, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were banned the first time — during his lifetime — not because Twain used the n word but because Twain’s black folks, like the enslaved Jim, were depicted as heroes and as thinking, feeling, loving human beings rather than subhuman property akin to livestock.)

 

That was quite the segue, wasn’t it?

 

I had to wean myself from the idea that “the exact right word”

— especially if it isn’t in common usage these days —

is NOT the best way to communicate with readers!

SURPRISING BUMP IN DE BOOK SALES 

 

I think several of the English students in both Sarchi’ classes have ordered DeForest Kelley Up Close and Personal  to read.  I just went to KDP to look at my sales this month and the region with the most sales was “other” —  not Germany, not the US, not Canada, just an unspecified “other.”

 

This has never happened before, ever.

 

Even Japan gets identified at KDP.

 

So, I think these sales came from right here in Costa Rica.  That is so cool! I know Jon ordered one, but that was well before this month. These sales have happened just over the past few days, which corresponds to the dates I was with the English classes in Sarchi’.  So, I’m very jazzed about that!  (To quote Sally Field when she accepted her Oscar: “You like me! You really like me!”)

 

It gives me grins!!!