I wrote some stuff...

I seem to have done nothing but write in the two weeks since my exams finished, so I'm going to give you a little update on what I've been writing.

I spent a couple of days editing Courage To Live, my NaNoWriMo novel, before I realised how much of a ridiculously huge task editing was going to be and since then I haven't so much as looked at it. The NaNo novel I wrote the year before that, Seven For A Secret, has long since been condemned as appalling and terrible and I'm surprised I ever wrote again. After flicking through it I found a couple of paragraphs which were actually good and decided to turn my 50,000 word novel into a 7,000 word short story. The story has the same very basic plot (in that the main character's sister dies) only the chapters are replaced with letters. Not like abc letters, but letters that go in an envelope and get a stamp on them. I wrote the first of seven letters and then got bored.

Due to the boredom, I wrote another short story about a woman called Gemma who can tell when people are about to die. It ends in a death, because somehow that always seems to happen. Mid-year resolution: stop writing about death.

I'm now 1,878 words into a novel I'm co-authoring with my Grandad. We've had a project going in which he writes books and I edit them (by which I mean I alter the writing and not the content), and it has resulted in two self-published novel(la)s. The third will hopefully be around 50,000 words if we can stretch the plot that far. So far, I'm having fun with characters that are not my creation. The whole writing a novel thing is less daunting when half of it is being written by someone else.

Something which is brand new to me is the writing of poetry. I seem to be okay at it, though occasionally it descends into gibberish just so I can make it rhyme. I definitely need more practice.

And now I have a chapter to finish!

Steeple.

Microsoft Word does not believe that steeple is a verb. I used the phrase steepled fingers and a red squiggly line appeared under the word in a "What do you think you are doing?" kind of way; naturally, I Googled (ah - I'll get back to this) it and found the dictionary definition:

To provide with or form into a steeple or steeple-like configuration.

A steeple is basically a spire, so the verb to steeple means to make into a spire-like shape. If you press the fingertips of your two hands together keeping your palms a few centimetres apart, it does indeed make the shape of a cone -- or a spire.

Maybe I find this more interesting that it is, but the process of creating verbs of nouns is one of the more noticeable progressions of language. To Google, for example, is not recognised as a real word by the powers that be -- i.e., people who write dictionaries -- but I bet you use it. Eventually, common usage will probably mean that there won't be a little red line under it in any program with a spellchecker (another verb from a noun). 

Sort of ironically, the only term I know of for this process is verbing, or alternatively verbification, which is simply not as cool. The word verb is a noun and by making it into the word verbing you are actually verbing it. In order to verb verb you must first have a verb meaning to verb and, well, there you have a weird and wonderful word paradox. 

The blogger spellchecker hates me right now.