The Wordguise Alembic

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Where the oxymoron meets the ham sandwich

Nice Joy Writing Review

February 21st, 2012

I’ve been in Kansas for the last few days, which has been surreal in many ways. If I can come up with a way to describe it, I’ll do so.

Very kind (and well written!) review of Joy Writing waiting for me when I got home today. That was cool. In case you’re wondering, the other cover (the brownish one) is the newest one but the book’s text is identical. I’ve never met Patricia, but I hope to at some point:

http://patriciastoltey.blogspot.com/2012/02/joy-writing-by-kenn-amdahl-book-review.html

Orphan Sentences

February 14th, 2012

The book I’m trying to finish refuses to cooperate. Some sections at the end drag, no matter what I do. This weekend I devised a strategy that helped. It might work for you, too.

The book, “Revenge of the Pond Scum,” describes my  journey trying to learn what causes Alzheimer’s and ALS. By “journey” I mean reading  books and scientific articles on the Internet and trying to translate them into normal English. As I started out, the project seemed reasonably easy because, after all, it was about my favorite subject: me. Before I knew much about the topic, it was easy to write conversational sections about what transpired in my life and how that related to the quest.

As I got deeper, my brain became full of facts, opinions and theories from a huge range of disciplines. I learned about cyanobacteria (hence the book’s title) and fruit bats, fungi, herbicides, insecticides, excitotoxins, superoxide dismutase, inflammatory responses and the diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies. I wanted to include as much of this cool information as I could.

Some of it even felt like new connections no one else had made. For example, believe it or not, I don’t think anyone else has described the possible role of the rotenone in derris root as a contributing factor of lytco-bodig disease on Guam. If I’m right about that, obviously, I can’t edit it out even though it may not fascinate you. I certainly couldn’t edit out the role of thiamine and hydrogen sulfide. But jamming all that stuff into one book made for some boring sections. Finally I decided to just live with that.  It’s a short book, no law compels anyone to read every single word. But it bothers me.

As a compromise, I invented a writing trick. I scrolled through the problem sections and stopped at a random paragraph. Without the distracting context of the surrounding text, I examined that one paragraph for flaws. Did I slip into awkward syntax? Did I rely too heavily on easy, passive verbs? Did each sentence carry its own weight? Or could some of them be excised, even if they contained facts I personally thought were cool, without harming the paragraph?

This little tactic helped me a lot. I realized that some of the “boring” parts felt that way because they contained information that simply didn’t fit. Interesting stuff to me, but not important to the point of the chapter. They distracted. Because the writing itself wasn’t bad, and the information was cool, it felt wasteful to delete them. I’m a verbal hoarder.

So I cut them and pasted them into my separate text document of notes. I did not kill them, I just transported them to a new home where they can prance and cavort with other orphaned sentences. Knowing they’re happy, I feel better about removing them from their original environment.

And readers won’t have to step around them to walk through the book.

David Brooks and Mitt Romney

February 10th, 2012

David Brooks, whose main gig is writing for the N.Y. Times, is my favorite conservative columnist. Used to be William Buckley, who used words as weapons and made all the rest of us feel like we’d brought a knife to a nuclear bomb fight. I like Brooks because he’s smart, reasonable, open minded and non combative. He’s a fine writer; on the other hand, he’s usually wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet Poetry and Free Downloads

February 5th, 2012

If I could google Facebook
And you tubed out on youtube
Yahoo! I’d twitter, tweet or twirp
Lose weight for free, make money cheap
Free the prisoner, free speech, free porn, free kittens
Obama trumps Romney but not free videos
Download sex from Iran
Deficits from Israel
A torrent of bits from Gingrich
God, the Bible and conservatives
Fill the shadows of the Internet
Like a super bowl. Keywords searched
And optimized for engines
Flow together like some
Bizarre sort of poetry.

Consumer Confidence

February 3rd, 2012

Economic growth requires several things. Three of the most important are capital, demand for goods and services, and consumer optimism. Four years ago, each one was in short supply. Today they’re not. That’s why I’m a whole lot more optimistic than most people right now.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Old Street

January 31st, 2012

This street has forgotten me
Invisible, I haunt it
January wind displaces leaves
And memories
But my thin hair does not move
My skin feels no chill
A strange window protects
Us from each other
This street and I
A windshield of words
The church of sadness and magic
Looms like a thunder cloud
Haunted– but not by me.

Kenn Amdahl

State of the Union

January 28th, 2012

While the GOP struggles to choose between the ultimate Wall Street insider and the ultimate Washington insider, it was nice to hear Obama speak like a regular American.  Obama reminds us who we really are: Americans work hard, work smart, work together, and  get things done. I hope the country heard what I heard, which was, “Hey, we’ve been angry and frightened for ten years and that’s not our national character. We’re tired of feeling angry all the time. We’re ready to feel proud again. Let’s get to work.”

I sent that paragraph to the Denver Post right after the speech, and they printed it. I guess now I can consider myself a “published author.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kindle Select Experiment

January 23rd, 2012

How will Ebook readers  change the way we think about books? And how will we older writers (who are not household names) cope with new strategies for selling our words in this new world? Those two questions occupy a huge percentage of conversation among writers these days. Read the rest of this entry »

Jumper Free this Saturday only

January 17th, 2012
I signed up for a Kindle promotion just to see how that might work. This Saturday, Jan 21, my funny little book Jumper and the Bones will be absolutely FREE as a Kindle download on Amazon. If you know anyone who might like it, let them know.  Free only on that one day. Info on the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Jumper-and-the-Bones

Science Writers’ Group

January 15th, 2012

Yesterday I attended a little get together for science writers in Boulder. I may not have paid close enough attention to the instructions, however. I remembered it was at one o’clock at a restaurant called the “brewing something.” Luckily, the address was memorable: 2525 Arapahoe. I googled it, the arrow pointed a  block or so east of famous McGuckin’s Hardware which I have frequented for decades. That made sense: McGuckin’s is on Folsom, which is the same as 24th Street. A block or so east of McGuckin’s there must be a new brew pub.  At 12:30  I left Broomfield and aimed for Boulder, leaving myself plenty of time to drop off my Timex for a battery replacement on the way. Read the rest of this entry »