Okay, then…

So my third book arrived a few hours after my post, the day before yesterday. I thumbed through all three books; the books were not exactly what I expected, but I am not disappointed in them. The Emotions Thesaurus, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, was my favorite, by far. This book is filled with extremely helpful synonym’s for well used words and really helped me get ‘unstuck’ – or, at least, not be repetitive – on emotion descriptions. Very handy, especially when you’re sitting there writing away and you know there’s a better word to use but it escapes you… chances are, this book has it. The other two books, both by the same authors, for Negative Traits Thesaurus and Positive Traits Thesaurus, are both filled with loads of extremely useful and helpful information, but still not quite what I expected. Maybe I was thinking they would be written and presented a long the lines of The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits, by Linda Edelstein.

Edelstein’s book has really helped me start the character creation process; I can look up the various stereotypes and mix-and-match complimentary traits to better present a more rounded out character. Now, I’m not saying I won’t be able to do that with the Positive/Negative Thesaurus’ written by Ackerman and Puglisi, eventually – it’s likely more along the lines of them presenting the information in a different format than what I expected.

So I was able to rework some descriptions I had previously written; they’re main characters in my current novel, but I felt some of my wordage was fairly stale and used a lot. So I tried the minimalistic approach – which fell flat for my readers, as I mentioned. Hopefully, these books will help bring the freshness back. And on the plus side, I also wrote 1000 words last night. Might not seem like much to some, but after a week long dry-spell, it felt like a lot!

Last thing I want to mention here, totally unrelated to writing, is how shocked I was when I heard Alan Rickman had passed… such a great actor, he will be missed. I adored him in Galaxy Quest, thought he was simply the best in the Harry Potter movies, was awesome in Sweeny Todd, and I could go on.

K, I am so outtie….