Why I Love Color Words and Why Whom Should Die

The view out our driveway the other day. This seems to be shaping up to be a snowy winter!

This week's topic is a good one for the annual Word Whores' Holiday Party. We're breaking out the brandied eggnog, mead and cookies this week and throwing out the cocktail conversation challenge:

What are your five most loved and hated words?

So, I have a confession to make.

As usual, huh?

Must be the brandied eggnog.

I started a list of "Good Words" when I was twelve. I know, I know - my best friend made the 7th grade cheerleading squad and had a boyfriend. I was making lists of good words. This might seem like a stretch, but those words and my feelings about them were absolutely tied in with my burgeoning sexuality. Unlike my friend, I wasn't ready to make out with boys at parties, but I thought about, and read about, sex a lot.

This, no doubt, explains a great deal about how I've ended up where I am today.

I've lost that list - I bet there were 30-50 words on it, that I added to over time - but I know that many of my favorite words today were on it. All of them tie into sensual, exuberant feelings. Here are five of them:

Exquisite

Ebullient

Effervescent

Egregious

Voluptuous

Why do so many begin with the letter "e"? I have no idea. Probably some Facebook app personality analysis would return a verdict. My original list also contained a lot of color/jewel-related words. It's no coincidence that my Facets of Passion series has color titles - or that my original title for Rogue's Pawn was "Obsidian." Yes, I have a list of color words I like, as potential future titles for the Facets of Passion. As a hint, the next three I have contracted are Emerald, Adamantine and Amber.

 As for my most hated words?

You know, this isn't a thing for me. Probably this says something about me, too, but I don't really have words I despise in the same way I have words that make me tingle all over. I know a lot of people hate "moist" or "suckle." They don't bother me. In fact, I can think of only one word that I'll never willingly use:

Whom

Right? I mean, enough already. It's archaic. Most of my editors consider it optional and restricted to formal English. Nobody uses it in conversation. (Okay, yes, some of you do. Have some more mead and stop that.)

I am, however, willing to entertain votes for hated words. Anyone got one that makes their skin crawl?

A Fairy Thing

by Jeffe Kennedy

I'll fess up: I have a fairy thing.

Maybe it's the Irish/Scot ancestry, but I believe in the little people. I love fairy tales and most of my writing is heavily influenced by those archetypes.

I may or may not have an extensive collection of fairy figurines.

Now, let's be clear. I'm not talking about Tinkerbell and her cutesy ilk. It's difficult for me to find fairy images I like, because of the silliness factor most artists seem compelled to slather on, like pink frosting and decorative sugar heaped on a sublime dark chocolate. It's a Hello Kittification of things that are alien and unsettling.

For me, fairies are the other. They don't share human values. They play tricks and have a ruthless self interest that shows up in story after story. In many ways, fairies cross over with demons and devils, as far as their behavior and roles in stories. This might have to do with the advent of Christianity into the Celtic world and the co-opting of these pagan spirits into the hierarchy of heaven and hell.

Fairies are similar to demons. They represent chaos and run counter to the neat structure of a good Christian society. They're as capricious and cruel as nature herself.

When I wrote OBSIDIAN (which comes out June 18 from Carina Press - hooray!), I wanted to preserve that sense of alien wildness in my version of Faerie. My heroine is a neuroscientist, very ground in logic, who ends up in this place without clear rules. The only real structure, in fact, comes from deal-making and bargaining. (Something else fairies share with the devils - striking an agreement to receive a gift in exchange for a price. Be very, very careful what you wish for!) Some of my fairies are pretty. All of them carry a sheen of beauty or whimsy, with a dark and twisty interior. My heroine even refers to one as Nasty Tinkerbell.

This is one of the best parts of being a writer. I get to write the fairies my way.

Just for Sidekicks

I've been watching Castle lately. I know, I know - I'm not the TV girl, but I am Netflix girl and sister Word-Whore KAK got me watching the show. It's really kind of irresistible for a writer, even if Rick Castle doesn't spend all that much time actually writing. I understand. It makes for slow screen time.

Anyway, in the episode last night, thriller writer Castle is trying to cheer up homicide Detective Beckett by reeling off a list of fictional detectives and asking her what they all had in common and she says "a plucky sidekick?" The answer he's going for is that they all made major breakthroughs after getting thrown off a case, but that's neither here nor there. What it does is lead into a running theme for the episode of whether Castle is Beckett's plucky sidekick or a partner.

She points out that the plucky sidekick always gets killed.

The Word Detective, one of my favorite etymologists, says here (you have to scroll down) that "sidekick" is a term that "first appeared in the slang of the criminal underworld about 1906, and originally meant a close confederate or accomplice in crime" and that

The specialized slang of pickpockets may supply some clues. To a pickpocket, a "kick" is a pair of trousers, and, more specifically, the trouser pockets. "Kick" in this "pocket" sense first appeared in the mid-1800s, and to this day "kick" is used as slang for a roll of bills or other stash of cash. The side pockets of a man's trousers have long been known, logically enough, as the "side-kicks," and it seems plausible that this term eventually came to be applied to a criminal confederate who was as close to the speaker as the pockets in his pants.

So, it's really the storytellers who picked up sidekick as a literary device. The slightly lesser-status assistant to the protagonist. Forever Tonto, never the Lone Ranger. Dramatically unfair.

I notice in my own stories that the sidekicks are nearly always animals. In OBSIDIAN, he's a cat named Darling, with a distinctly un-darling personality. I think this comes naturally to me. Cats have always been a part of my life, always nearby, weaving through my days. Like any good sidekick, they're always secondary characters in my personal drama. There for comfort, for comic relief, to show me where the best patches of sun are.

I bet they'd make excellent pickpocketing accomplices, too.

Jeffe - The Soundtrack

by Jeffe Kennedy

Regular readers here and on my personal blog know I'm big on writing rituals to get and keep the flow. Music can be a big part of that.

Back when I first really got serious about being a writer, which meant, um, actually writing instead of just talking about it, music was a major tool.

I needed something back then to put my mind in the right mode to write, because I had no good habits. Okay, I needed a bunch of somethings, but that was a biggie for me. So I wrote to the soundtrack for The Mission. Every time.



Even now those opening strains light me up and make me want to write.

I don't listen to it as often now, but this music is like an old friend, the fallback sounds I can count on to dig me out of the deepest hole.

OBSIDIAN was written pretty much entirely to this soundtrack.

When I started my second novel, THE BODY GIFT, I wanted to try something different. There were two songs at the time that really were lighting me up. They still do it for me.

This isn't the exact version of Antje Duvekot's Merry-Go-Round that I listen to, but I like this live acoustic version, too. And no, I've never seen the commercial she talks about either.



The other is Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek. The official music video for it turns out to be kind of cool - and hugely bracketed by obnoxious ads that you can't make go away. I didn't want to pollute your little minds with that crap, so this is just the lyrics running by.



The final piece is the great boon to my life that is Genius on iTunes. I took these two songs and created a playlist of just shy of 300 songs that I call my Rowan playlist. Rowan is the heroine in TBG and this music is really all about her.

I'm not sure I could exactly explain why.

These days, I mostly write in silence. Sometimes I put on the Rowan playlist. Sometimes the Writing playlist, which now consists of soundtracks from The Mission, Master & Commander and Billy Joel's Fantasies and Delusions.

I know. I've been accused of giving people musical whiplash.

Extra points if you can identify the duet on the iPod - another of my all-time favorites.