Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
February 11, 2015

She said it . . .
“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” – Colette, author (1873-1954)

Who’s up next . . .
February 17: Lisa McDougal (chapter 26, Tebow Family Secret), Amber Boudreau (flash fiction), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter 12, part 2, novel), Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 11, Coastie Girl), Millie Mader (chapter 60, Life on Hold), and Andy Brown (chapter, The Last Library).

February 24: ???

March 3: Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 12, Coastie Girl),, Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Mike Rickey (poems), Judith McNeil (???), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 9-10, Rooster’s Story).

Fifth Tuesday . . .
It’s only seven weeks away . . . March 31 at Mystery To Me Bookstore. Second-and-fourth group hosts. And this is a potluck event, so plan now for what you want to bring to share.

TWS alumna Susan Gloss Parsons will be our special guest, talking about her experiences getting her first novel published by Morrow.

Harper Lee to publish a second novel . . .
But in the chronology of things, it will be her first, that is the first novel Harper Lee wrote.

We know her for To Kill a Mockingbird which HarperCollins published in 1960, a multi-million seller that most of us read in school.

Prior to that, Lee had written Go Set a Watchman, a novel that describes how a grown-up Scout Finch returns from New York to confront attitudes of the 1950s in her Alabama hometown.

Her editor at the time told her to write a different book. Set it 20 years earlier, he said. Describe Scout’s understanding of her father Atticus Finch’s courtroom defense of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman.

Will Watchman have the same success as Mockingbird? HarperCollins is betting on it. The book already is No. 1 on Amazon, based on pre-orders. It will be in bookstores on July 14.

There is controversy. Lee always maintained she would never publish another book – To Kill a Mockingbird was it – and friends believe Lee’s lawyer may have abused that desire when she negotiated the sale of the manuscript to HarperCollins.

You may want to read the February 8 Associated Press story about it. Here’s the link: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BOOKS_HARPER_LEE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Great word . . .
From Wordsmith Anu Garg:
nimrod

PRONUNCIATION: (NIM-rod)

MEANING: noun:
1. A stupid person.
2. A hunter.

ETYMOLOGY:
In the Bible, Nimrod was a hunter and Noah’s great-grandson. It’s not clear how the sense of the word transferred from a hunter to a stupid person, but the new sense was popularized in the Bugs Bunny cartoons when Bugs Bunny called rabbit-hunting Elmer Fudd as “Poor little Nimrod”. Earliest documented use for sense 1: 1933, for sense 2: 1623. Even earlier, the first recorded use in English is from 1548, in a now-obsolete sense as a tyrant.

USAGE:
“What kind of a nimrod makes kids the responsible party in a dim-witted ideology on poverty and neglect?”
– Martin Hackworth; Ignoramus, of the Bloviating Type; Idaho State Journal (Pocatello); Feb 3, 2013.

“The big-ticket item at their giant auction was a nimrod package to go hunting.”
– Dick Harmon; Hunt Nets Dough for Y; Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah); Jun 12, 2004.