by Roseanna White | Sep 17, 2012 | Word of the Week
I was actually reading this weekend (oooo…ahhhh), and oh-so-enjoying losing myself in the pages of a fine historical. A fine historical that at one point made me pause when these 1866 characters used the word sketchy.
Insert Roseanna narrowing her eyes and scratching her head. And being word-nerd enough to pause and go, “Really? I trust this author and publisher, but…really?”
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| Da Vinci, Head of a Woman sketch |
So naturally I had to look it up. =)
And indeed,
sketchy was a word by then. By, in fact, 1805. At which point it had a literal meaning of “sketch + y” says
www.etymonline.com. Which made me scratch my head again, because I’ve honestly never heard it used in a literal sense. So I hop over to
dictionary.com to see what
that is and discover it means (duh) “like a sketch, giving only outlines or essentials.” Which…yeah, okay. From which came the meaning of “imperfect or incomplete.” But
that sense didn’t emerge until 1878.
Not sure when the informal, slang meaning of “disreputable / shady” joined the family, but that one, I’m pretty sure is more modern. And how I usually hear it used. 😉
Hope everyone had a great weekend! I’m happy to report that I’ve finished going over my galleys for
Ring of Secrets and am ready to send the manuscript home to Harvest House today. =) Quite a relief, as now I can focus on preparing for conference. Woot!
by Roseanna White | Sep 13, 2012 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
At the beginning of August,
I blogged about the trip we took to Texas and how it opened the door for us to start teaching our kids about volunteering and helping others wherever they see a need. Well, when we got home we talked to our church about starting a monthly day of service in our area, and now we’re happy to see that coming to fruition.
We’re going to start small, with trash pick-up at a local park. Also planned are things like caroling at the local assisted living facilities in December and helping at the food pantry in November. All things we can bring the kids along for, and hopefully brighten a few days.
To make it all official, my hubby dearest is making
t-shirts for the occasion, and so we started trolling the web for some great quotes on helping others. We ended up with this one:
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| Quote, obviously, from Einstein. Design by Roseanna. Blinding t-shirt color that I didn’t quite capture here chosen by my hubby 😉 |
But we found so many great quotes, that I just wanted to share the ones that most struck me. My favorite was the MLK one, but it was just too long:
“Everybody can be great. Because anybody can
serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t
have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve…. You don’t
have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.
You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. ” ~Martin Luther King, Jr.
And some other great ones . . .
“Service is the rent we pay for being.” ~ Marian Wright Edelman
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ~ Anne Frank
“Do all the good you can, and make as little fuss about it as possible.” ~ Dickens
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” ~ Dickens
“Many small people, in many small places, do many small things, that can alter the face of the world.” ~ Anonymous
“To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.” ~ Henry Ford
Personally, I think these are some great things to be keeping in mind as I prepare for the ACFW conference next week. This year, my prayer for the conference is that I might be a blessing. I don’t know how better to start on that goal than to put aside thoughts of me. And think of you instead.
by Roseanna White | Sep 12, 2012 | Remember When Wednesdays, Uncategorized
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| The Apothecary by Pietro Longhi, 1752 |
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed reading in historical novels, and now weaving into my own, is when the author describes a condition that we know the name for, but which hadn’t been a recognized diagnosis at the time.
For example, in the awesomely fantabulous and breathtaking Love’s Reckoning by Laura Franz that I just finished, one of the characters falls and smacks her head and is then plagued by debilitating headaches for months afterward. We know that she had a concussion. They just knew she was pained again and needed headache powders.
Similarly, I have a character in
Ring of Secrets who history describes as having “black moods” and “bouts of anxiousness.” He was aware of this within himself and tried to offset it, but he couldn’t control it. Today, we know this would be some form of depression, perhaps even bipolar disease. I obviously took a few liberties with describing these bouts of this historical figure, since he didn’t exactly document his day-by-day life with his condition–and as I read through my galleys of
Ring of Secrets for the first time the last two days, I had to smile at this guy. My best friend/critique partner commented when she first read his chapters, “Wow. That kind of nerves seem like a bad idea for a spy…”
So very true. And therefore a trait I wouldn’t have thought to give him, I think. But that one was all truth, and it was just up to me to explore how he may have balanced that with the espionage “business” to which he was called.
And, go figure, I’m doing something similar in
Whispers from the Shadows. I’ve talked before, I think, about how my heroine is experiencing extreme sleep deprivation in the first half of the book. Studies have been done on insomnia now, of course, but the extremes are still shrouded in mystery because it’s too dangerous to mess around with. Still, we have words like “panic attack” and “night terror” to describe some of the side effects. Words not around in 1814. So obviously, I get to find other words to expound on her experiences.
But you know, though the vocabulary hadn’t been developed yet, the observations were still there. Plenty of people had talked about “black moods,” though they had no treatment for it. And my hero in book 2, a brig’s captain, thinks how he’s seen plenty of terrible consequences of sleeplessness during his days on the open water, has heard tales of the trauma it can produce.
And always, discovering what they knew at certain points of the past, how they would have treated it, and what they would have called what are everyday conditions now remains a challenge to learn and a lot of fun to include. =)
Now back I go to galleys! I need to try to squeeze two more reads in before I send this baby back. =)
by Roseanna White | Sep 10, 2012 | Word of the Week
I’m mixing things up today! Don’t worry, there’ll still be a wee bit of etymology here. But I also want YOUR thoughts.
So this past week there were two different times when I wanted an old-fashioned word for crazy. I found one I was looking for, which is:
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| by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta |
Crack. As in crack-brain fellow–this means, quite simply, crazy. Voila. To spice it up a bit more, you can even say something like cracked in the nob. (Nob being “head”…) This has been a meaning of crack since the 17th century, and the equivalent word was even used in Ancient Greek by Aristophanes! (Who, for the record, is not my favorite Greek playwright. He was a little, how shall we say, vulgar. Just so ya know…)
The thought there is pretty obvious–that your head/brain got cracked and all the sanity leaked out. (Oh, there are days…)
But I’d like to collect a few more. See, my heroine has been suffering severe sleep deprivation, which can result in some crack-brain symptoms like hallucinations and major mood swings. So twice I have someone wondering about her sanity. But I really shouldn’t use the same word both times, and “mad” and “crazy” and “insane” just get so boring, don’t they?
So who else can come up with a fun expression that would have been around in 1814? (I just found one other popular one that was, in fact from 1810. Let’s see if you can.) 😉
Ready…set…GO CRAZY!
by Roseanna White | Sep 7, 2012 | Uncategorized
I wanted to share with y’all a fun writing challenge hosted by my best friend over on Go Teen Writers. But unlike all her other contests, this one is open for all ages! Yay!
Rather than a see-how-many-words-you-can-write challenge, or a finish-a-book-in-a-month deal, this one’s goal is simply to get your rear in your writing chair EVERY day. The goal? 100 words. For how long? 100 days. Hence…
It doesn’t sound like much–you can write 100 words in about 10 minutes. But at the end of the 100 days, that’s a guaranteed 10,000 words in the manuscript you’re working on! Plus, that rear-in-chair thing can just get you rolling toward more.
For the full set of rules, visit Go Teen Writers. I’ll just take the time here to let you in on the prizes you’re entered to win if you complete the challenge.
First, a 10,000 critique of your manuscript. And second, this awesome necklace from Inspired Novelties, made especially for writers–the “What’s Your Story” necklace. (Critique is open to any English-writing author. Necklace to US addresses only.)
Most importantly, you have to sign up my Monday, September 10–so no dawdling! Hie thee over to Go Teen Writers and fill out the form!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.