Word-Wednesday for April 8, 2020

And here is the House Plant edition of Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, April 8, 2020, the 15th Wednesday of the year,  the 99th day of the year, with 267 days remaining.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for April 8, 2020
Sunrise: 6:46am; Sunset: 8:05pm; 3 minutes, 31 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 9:05pm; Moonset: 7:28am, waning gibbous


Temperature Almanac for April 8, 2020
                Average           Record           Today
High             47                   79                   41
Low              27                   -3                   26


April 8 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National All is Ours Day
• National Empanada Day
• National Zoo Lovers Day

April 8 Word Riddle
What is Forrest Gump’s password?


April 8 Pun
Those that confuse burro and burrow don’t know their a** from a hole in the ground.

April 8 Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Gatzke Woman Diagnosed with Resting-Nice-Face-19


April 8 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1341 Petrarch crowned a poet on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.
• 1820 The famous ancient Greek statue, Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos.

April 8 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1921 Jan Novák, Czech classical composer.
• 1933 Jaroslav Smolka, Czech composer.
• 1955 Barbara Kingsolver.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• alysm: the feeling of restlessness or frustrated boredom that comes from being unwell.
• brunoise: a culinary knife cut in which the food item is first julienned and then turned a quarter turn and diced again, producing cubes of about 3 mm or less on each side.
• cornigerous: having horns or hornlike protuberances.
• dwizzen: to shrivel up; to dry out and shrink.
• fossick: to search about or to rummage.
• listicle: a piece of writing or other content presented wholly or partly in the form of a list.
• macarism: the finding of pleasure in the joy of other people.
• pronk: to stot.
• sfumato: the technique of allowing tones and colors to shade gradually into one another, producing softened outlines or hazy forms.
• soupçon: a small quantity of something.
• wallydraigle: a lazy, unkempt, or slovenly person; a good-for-nothing, a slob, a slattern.

April 8, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.
Alan Paton

Rules
rule /rōōl/ one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. Rules for writers? How dare you limit my creative capacities? Wannaskan’s have a carefully cultivated reputation for being rule-wary, and Wannaska’s writers for being rule-barbarians.

Nonetheless, internationally renowned writers often compose lists of rules for writers. As you review their lists below, perhaps think of list items as “suggestions” or “ideas” rather than “rules”, where one might pay most attention to the suggestion or idea for which one has the greatest resistance.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules for Writing

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said".
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose".
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Zadie Smith's 10 Rules for Writing

1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticize your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no "writer’s lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­Internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for a Great Story

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

David Ogilvy’s 10 No-B#llsh#t Tips for Writers

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing*.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning—and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

         *Read it three times.

Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments for Writers, from his book, Henry Miller on Writing

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring".
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Jack Kerouac's Belief & Technique for Modern Prose

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

From A Year with Rilke, April 8 Entry
How to Bloom, from Uncollected Poems.

The almond trees in bloom: all we can accomplish here is to ever know ourselves in our earthly appearance.

I endlessly marvel at you, blissful one—at your demeanor,
the way you bear your vanishing adornment with timeless purpose.
Ah, to understand how to bloom: then would the heart be carried
beyond all milder dangers, to be consoled in the great one.

Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.

*1forrest1.