Collective Nouns

            There was a joke about collective nouns stating that it could be a trash can or a magnet. I am including my spam inbox and brain as a similar example. My editor said that she was surprised at the wide variety of words that I used in my story. Names and dates will still elude me, but Google has helped immensely. Although I can’t always think of a word as quickly as I once did and say do hickey, whatcha-ma-call-it, or thing-a-ma-jig, I usually can come up with the word that I wanted eventually. For a writer and author, this can be disconcerting when I am deep in a plot and can’t think of the exact word that is necessary for the plot to continue. There are times that I will put in a word into the story that is close to the meaning, until I can find the word that I want.

            Beside me are four books that help me in my quest for the proper words or the phrases that I am trying to find: the Great Encyclopedic Dictionary, the Webster’s New World Roget’s Thesaurus, the Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible, and my Hebrew-Greek Key Word Study Bible. If all else fails, I do fall back on Google.

            Poetry and Haiku are easier for me. I feel more comfortable presenting a thought, plot, or story in a short amount of time and a short amount of words. I have more difficulty stretching stories into a book length novel. So in my three books that I’ve written, I do a series of standalone tales that are loosely related to each other to give the readers a full book to enjoy. My editor says that they are cozy mysteries, easy to read and easy to pick up and start again.

            I’m struggling with my next book in the series. The main character, Tommy Two Shoes’ wife, Cora is coming into her own and hopefully will be an equal partner in the Private investigation company the her husband has started. To make sense of some of the plot, I will need to weave in some of the facts and characters of the other books. Too much will bore those who have read the first three and too little will leave the people confused as to who, what, and when, So far, I have three stories written, but I am working on that lead in plot to connect the past with what is happening in this story line.