Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays with Story
December 31, 2015

The first word . . .

“No one knew what to call my first book. Everyone was against most of the titles. There was only one they had no opinion about – A Curtain of Green. My editor said, “If we call it A Curtain of Green, you’ll never need another title. Your second book could be A Curtain of Black and the one after that A Curtain of Blue. Your final book could just be called Curtains.’” – Eudora Welty (1909-2001), novelist, short story writer

It’s back to B&N Westside for everyone . . .

Here’s who’s up next:

January 5: Lisa McDougal (chapter 46, Tebow Family Secret), Randy Slagel (short story, part 1, “Watered-Down Witch”), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Judith McNeil (???), Millie Mader (???), and Kashmira Sheth (chapters, Nina Soni).

January 12: Carol Hornung (???).

January 19: Alicia Connolly-Lohr (???), Kashmira Sheth (chapters, Nina Soni), Pat Edwards (???), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Randy Slagel (short story, part 2, “Watered-Down Witch”), and Jerry Peterson (chapters 25-28, Killing Ham).

Word of the year: Emoji . . .

The story from Oxford Dictionaries: “Oxford Dictionaries made history when it announced that their 2015 ‘Word of the Year’ would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives:

“‘Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,’ the company’s team wrote in a press release. ‘Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.’

“Oxford University Press – which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online – partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the ‘Face With Tears of Joy’ emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number:

“Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. ‘Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,’ he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the ‘playfulness and intimacy’that characterizes emoji-using culture.

Read the entire post at http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

The last word . . .