NaNoWriMo: The Halfway Point

It’s hard to believe it’s already the halfway point for NaNoWriMo. I have been enjoying my first foray into the event. I like my main character (good thing, since it’s all about him!), and my companion character that I recently introduced makes me laugh a lot. All in all, it’s been a fun adventure to push myself into the story and just let it happen.

My stats aren’t where I had hoped they would be. Being the halfway point, I should be at/near the 25k word count, but sadly, I am not. After an okay-ish start, I unexpectedly had to travel out of state for a few days. Riding in a car for 12 hours there and back, one would think I had a pretty good chance of staying on task, but nope. Turns out keeping a 1 1/2 year old happy and fighting my own battles with carcolepsy (car narcolepsy – seriously, put me in a car if you want me to take a nap) makes writing a difficult task. 

Look It Up

Hyperbole

[hahy-pur-buh-lee]

noun, Rhetoric.

1. obvious and intentional exaggeration.

2. an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity.”.

Hyperbole: a word that I always have to look up the definition – and then when I read what it means, realize I do it on a daily basis. For some reason this really amuses me. It is also one of those words that I read completely wrong, every time. Hyper-bowl is not right, and really screws up the flow of a sentence.

But when I stop and think about it, there are a lot of words in the English language that amuse me for odd reasons. Take “onomatopoeia” for example, another word I often forget the definition of. When I see the word, it makes me think of some strange library or magic dictionary. Mostly because it rhymes with encyclopedia. Encyclopedia in my mind = books on a shelf (library) and pages of information (fat dictionary). Makes perfect sense.

A term that will stick with me for the rest of my life that was hammered into me during a high school English class: anti-transcendentalism. I cannot remember a lick regarding what the teacher was teaching us about this term, and in addition, I loathed reading and examining the Scarlet Letter. I’m also completely convinced that my teacher had an unhealthy obsession with the term “anti-transcendentalism”, and took it as a personal challenge to use the word as often/creatively as possible during that part of the curriculum. It was pure torture. I can still see her crazed, smiling face chirping the word repeatedly and saying something about it being such a lengthy, wonderful word. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love to learn new words. I love the word a day calendars, and I always make it a point to read the weird word being featured on thesaurus.com when I’m writing. Which reminds me that I called a thesaurus a theOsaurus well into high school, and I can recall one of my teachers asking which dinosaur I was referring to.

Oh hyper-bowl, look at the rabbit hole you’ve pulled me down.