Carolyn Shares a Memoir-ish Account of Her Love of Words

Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares writers’ resources on her award-winning blog Sharing with Writers

This is a blogpost replay. It originally appeared in a print magazine and then the Insecure Writers Group’s (ISWG) blog. I’m publishing in in my own blog today because I ran across it when I was searching for ideas among my own files for a new booklet for my HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers from #ModernHistoryPress. It should be in print in early 2024! This story shows a little about how a love for words (in this case “The Vocabulary Habit” led to lots of freelance work for me…and lots of new friends in the publishing industry. It brings back memories for me. I hope it leads to some memories for your own writing past—maybe a submission to this blog! We’ll make our own little #SharingwithWriters blog series. Maybe we’ll have a contest for what to call it.  Something like “SharingwithWriters Book of Memories.” I bet you can come up with a better name! 

I was in love with writing—and even grammar—long before I was in love with words. I became smitten with words about the same time I fell in love with my husband about sixty-three years ago. When we opened the door to our new one-bedroom apartment ($75. a month, I kid you not!), we found a tattered book that once belonged to a previous tenant. It was one of the early paperbacks (pocketbooks) called something like “A Word a Day” and we committed exactly that—one word a day—to memory before we went to sleep each night. We did it together. That list was spot-on. It produced a list of words that appear on later SAT exams and a Graduate Record Exam (GRE) or two.

My vocabulary-intensity rating went up and down after that, mostly down. Jobs, children, and a business interfered. But lately it crescendoed along with my interest in poetry. And then one day (it was a cloudy, uneventful day during my self-imposed isolation during the Days of Covid) an email from WordGenius appeared in my email box. I may have signed up for it. If I did, I don’t remember, and I was a bit annoyed. Spam, I thought. But I played their little games and got hooked again. Then the emails kept getting more frequent. New and even more fun features. It was a little like the internet in general, designed for addiction.

I was especially intrigued with the words that were directly related to writing. They reminded me of a column I once wrote for a print magazine in the early 2000s for…was it Writer’s Magazine? I remembered what the column was called so I did a search in my computer for “Affecting Words” and there they were. Every single column. Soon I was adding words I collected from my new email games that I might someday use for more “Affecting Words” columns, words I didn’t know then, some words I had never heard!

That list is getting longer, and I started thinking about a kind of memoir based on the love of words—especially words associated with writing—and what Carolyn See, a now-deceased writing friend called The Writing Life in her memoir. 

And then it turned out that another auspicious email from Elizabeth Seckman, the editor of an IWSG newsletter I had subscribed to after I met a delightful young woman at a #writersconference in North Carolina. (That’s a good lesson on keeping in touch with people we meet in whatever industry our chosen profession happens to be in!). It wasn’t too long before I suggested a regular “The Vocabulary Habit” column to the powers that be at IWSG and authors and fans had new series from me showing up in their mailboxes.  That allowed me to continue to indulge in this newly revived addiction of mine. And I made a new friend with their newsletter’s editor, Elizabeth Seckman. I might have worn her out and now I’m working with another editor, Juneta Keyes!

If you are wondering if an author—a wordsmith by trade—could possibly need a word game other than The New York Times’ crossword puzzle you might already be addicted to, be sure to subscribe to ISWG’s newsletter and watch for the new booklet I’ll be doing for my series of books for writers. The booklet will be a little different; it will be limited to only writing-related words and if you don’t know some of them, you might someday wish you did. It’s all part of the writing business.

Here are some of “my” original Affecting Words” as a little test to see if you think you might run across some you need. As you can see, most are associated with writing or publishing in some way. Some may even nourish your crossword skills! In any case, why not give it a try! And send me words you’d like to see there at HoJoNews @ AOL dot com with “The Vocabulary Habit” in the subject line. 

Demiurgic

Palimpsest
Semantic Narrowing

Metonymy 

Asyndeton

Antiphon

Synecdoche (one of my favorites) 

Test yourself. Or join WordGenius.com and play with me. (No I don’t get paid for inviting you!) Of course, all my IWSG words won’t have appeared there and may not have appeared there in the past. 

Have I written the first page of that book I mentioned? Yes. But it’s slow going. Do you want to take bets on whether I do? I believe I will if I live long enough. But here’s the thing. In the meantime, I have lots of meat and potatoes for just such a book and I have renewed and fostered an old love. And all of you who visit and subscribe to ISWG will be helping me with my trek. What more could one ask from reviving an old habit (or is it a hobby?) than that? 

MORE ABOUT THE BLOGGER:

 

Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, editor, and retailer to the advice she gives in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers and the many classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program. The books in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books published by Modern History Press include the third editions of  both the multi award-winning The Frugal Book Promoter and The Frugal Editor which won awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and the coveted Irwin award in its earlier editions. Yes, she also loves #SharingwithWriters anywhere she can. Thank you, #IWSG, #WritersontheMove, #SPARREW and all the other bloggers who have not discouraged me from sharing my love of words.

PS: To be notified of the new book when it comes out, follow me on my Amazon Author Profile. Did you know Amazon offers such a thing free and when as you publish each new book Amazon notifies all those who have signed up to follow you. It’s a great way (and one of the only ways!) to even know who the multitude of readers who have searched for you or your books on Amazon are.  Did I say it’s FREE? Find mine at https://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile.