The Words Are Important

Yes, it is a very self serving notion seeing as how I wrote a book chock full o' words, but it is still the truth.  Words are great fun because there are so many of them and, if you look hard enough, you can find exactly, precisely the word you mean.  Since I'm not big on ambiguities, I've always collected words, filing them away until some esoteric nugget surges forward to describe my immediate need.  There is rarely any hidden subtext in my spoken words, no cryptic meanings and only a pinch of pretentiousness.  If I want something thrown out a window, I will say to have it defenestrated, because that one word says exactly what I mean.

Another great thing about words is how fun many of them are to say, yes I know it's weird, but where is the harm?  Not just regular words either, people's names often grab my attention because I enjoy saying them; I'm not a football fan but I know who Drew Brees is and love to say his name.  Personality notwithstanding, Marquis De Sade is fun to say as well, and there is a long standing joke between my husband and I that our next dog will be named Fisher DeBerry, because I love saying Fisher DeBerry.

So, when I set out to write the books, I knew subconsciously that words are important but I did not know that it would be a recurring theme in the series.  Prospector alludes to that notion when he tells his story to the Hunts, but it's Awnyx's friend Snatch who says it first.  Snatch is by no means the last character to say that the words are important and it took me some time to grasp the reason, other than the obvious of course.  By the end of The Last Prospector I realized what that idea meant to Solstice and that realization was an almost blinding epiphany.

Words are as important to the fabric of Solstice as the light stealers and the power of words is almost a character in the story.  However that character has certain rigid demands, if the words are important, then the words that I choose to tell about the words are equally as important.  To make that somewhat less confusing, I have to select my words with more than the usual care because some of our words are not in the vocabulary of Solstice.  They do not have a sun or moon, there is no bible and no chocolate, and it is very hard to find good words for 'brown' that don't involve chocolate somehow.

Keeping away from such common words as angel, heaven, christen, baptize and hell is an ongoing challenge, however I did manage to find a small chocolate loophole in book three.  But those words have no historical context in Solstice so I can't justify using them there and sometimes have to become very creative.  Like most challenges though, there is much to be discovered because of the conflict, things that I wouldn't have even thought about had I not challenged myself at all.