Word freaks (lexophiles) and constant scribblers (writers) have one thing in common - an enduring fascination with words. If you fall into either of these categories, you may be interested in these recently-published Kindle books about words and the knack for putting them down on paper:For Word Freaks
Grammar Girl's 101 Misused Words You'll Never Confuse Again, by Mignon Fogarty. St. Martin's Griffin, 2011. Print Length: 128 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $5.99; Paperback $5.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"You’ll learn when you should use affect and when effect is right, whether you should you say purposely or purposefully, what the difference is between hilarious and hysterical. Packed with clear explanations, fun quotations showing the word used in context, and the quick and dirty memory tricks Mignon is known for, this friendly reference guide ends the confusion once and for all and helps you speak and write with confidence." - Amazon.
Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives, by Arthur Plotnik. Viva Editions, 2011. Print Length: 280 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (37 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $10.85. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Say goodbye to 'awesome' and 'amazing' and say hello to Better Than Great, a veritable TKO of stale superlatives with almost 6,000 alternative terms. Lexophile Arthur Plotnik presents a skull-spinning assortment of words and ideas for describing extraordinary things - the exceptionally beautiful, joyful, delicious, large, forceful, intense, trendy and more - even 50 gr8t texting superlatives! Better Than Great is the must-have reference for anyone seeking to rise above tired superlatives when the quality matters, as in love, commerce, and the arts. Critics, journalists, poets, speakers, sales reps, bloggers, Twitterers - word slingers from the whole digital and literary spectrum - should find it to be a concussively euphoriant, supernal, larky, epiphanic, über-cool, soul-juddering experience, an upful and endorphining jubilee to make the heart warble." - Viva Editions
Neverisms: A Quotation Lover's Guide to Things You Should Never Do, Never Say, or Never Forget, by Mardy Grothe. Harper Collins, 2011. Print Length: 384 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (11 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Hardcover $10.26. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. Never change diapers in mid-stream. When we strongly encourage people to do something, it's called an exhortation. But what is the proper term for strongly discouraging people? One candidate is admonition. Another is dehortation, the opposite of exhortation. But perhaps the best term for an emphatic piece of dissuasive advice is neverism. You won't find the term in any dictionary (at least not yet) because quotation anthologist Dr. Mardy Grothe coined it himself for this collection of nearly two thousand quotable cautionary warnings. With the whimsical and witty intermixed with the serious and profound, contributors range from Aesop and Marcus Aurelius to John Wayne and Mae West. Grothe also tells the fascinating 'back stories' of scores of classic quotations as well as the history of hundreds more that have never before appeared in a quotation anthology." - Amazon.Thingamajigs and Whatchamacallits: Unfamiliar Terms for Familiar Things, by Rod L. Evans. Perigee, 2011. Print Length: 224 p. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99; Paperback $10.36. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Have you been guilty of catachresis at work? Have you defenestrated your dictionary in frustration? Do you have phloem bundles stuck in your diastema? Scratching your occiput now? Rod L. Evans's Thingamajigs and Whatchamacallits will help take the mystery out of some of our most obscure words. Containing hundreds of words from agitron (the phenomenon of wiggly lines in comic strips indicating that something is shaking) to zarf (the holder for a paper cone coffee cup), this lively reference will enable you to easily locate your thingamajig or whatchamacallit, be it animal, vegetable, mineral, or punctuation mark." - Amazon.
Alphabetter Juice: or, The Joy of Text, by Roy Blount Jr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print Length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $16.72. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"No man of letters savors the ABC’s, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. This book is for anyone - novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian - who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com? Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a 'girl gillie,' and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a 'giantess' than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative.." - Amazon.Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. - Mark Twain.
For Constant Scribblers
Writing a Novel with Scrivener, by David Hewson. Self-Published, 2011. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $5.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The writing and story development program Scrivener is taking the world by storm. Here the bestselling author David Hewson, creator of the successful Nic Costa series, offers a personal, highly-focussed guide to using this powerful application to create a novel. Hewson, a Scrivener user for years who's written five of his popular novels in the app, takes users through the basic processes of structuring a full-length novel, writing and developing the story, then delivering it either as a manuscript for an agent or publisher or as an ebook direct to Kindle or iBook. Alongside the practical advice, he offers a working novelist's insight into the process of writing popular fiction. And this book is, of course, created entirely within Scrivener itself, from development through to publication on Kindle, a process followed in detail in the book." - Amazon. Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks. Writers Digest Books, 2011. Print Length: 288 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (90 reviews). Kindle edition $7.96; Paperback $12.23. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The vast majority of writers begin the storytelling process with only a partial understanding where to begin. Some labor their entire lives without ever learning that successful stories are as dependent upon good engineering as they are artistry. But the truth is, unless you are master of the form, function and criteria of successful storytelling, sitting down and pounding out a first draft without planning is an ineffective way to begin. Story Engineering starts with the criteria and the architecture of storytelling...You'll learn to wrap your head around the big pictures of storytelling at a professional level through a new approach that shows how to combine these six core competencies which include: four elemental competencies of concept, character, theme, and story structure (plot), two executional competencies of scene construction and writing voice." - Amazon.
The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, by Marion Roach Smith. Grand Central Publishing, 2011. Print Length: 128 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $8.99; Paperback $9.12. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"A recent study revealed that the Number 1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book...about themselves. It's not that every person has lived such a unique or dramatic life, but we inherently understand that writing memoir - whether it's a book, blog, or just a letter to a child - is the single greatest portal to self-examination. While there have been other writing books, there's been nothing like Marion Roach Smith's The Memoir Project. Marion has written four books and she's been teaching a sold-out memoir writing class for 13 years. Her new book is a disarmingly frank, but wildly fun, distillation of all the unsentimental lessons that WORK. Tired topics like writing exercises, morning pages and 'writer's block' are replaced with quirky, provocative tactics that teach you to write with purpose." - Amazon.Dollars & Sense: The Definitive Guide to Self-publishing Success, by Carolyn McCray, Amber Scott, and Rachel Thompson. Self-Published, 2011. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (17 reviews). Kindle edition $2.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...a step-by-step actionable road map to increasing royalties for beginners and seasoned professionals alike. Divided into three sections; Producing a Sales-Friendly, Professional eBook, Establishing & Leveraging Your Social Media Platform, and Selling Smarter, Not Harder, Dollars & Sense walks authors through the process of creating then actually selling their eBook." - Amazon.
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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.
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