rantypants & snidbits: New words learned today

I learned two wonderful new words today…

rantypants || snidbits

— both self-explanatory, but not excessively so, since everyone knows pants don’t rant and bits do not snid; well… except that time in the fall — last September, I think — when bits became bites, the postman was annoyed and called the cops, who arrived amid sirens and rubber–laying screeches, pulled out their notebooks and began to snid the bits and their pieces together before making their arrest.

A slinky tom from the alley next door was hauled off to the clinker, but later released when 14 mice and one plump robin swore to his whereabouts elsewhere, murdering newborn rabbit kits.

The case cooled, the rantypants postman retired to his cottage in the Highlands and Tom began to hawk cat food on T.V., a big star with his own cage and personal appearances in the malls.

source

This entire rantypants snidbits was triggered by terribleminds.com, courtesy Chuck Wendig. (language alert)

The Blank Page

What I Fear Most

What I fear most, I realized today*, is not the blank page, but the words I might put on it, but don’t — (* I’ve always known this, but it has only now drifted from my subconscious to my conscious. This, then, lends more permanence to words than I give credit, not just that once they are thought, spoken or written, words cannot be taken back, even when the page is shredded, the thought banished, the spoken gobbled up by the negative space between humans, but that today, each word represents a sort of technological irony: words on the internet may be deleted, but they will continue to exist somewhere where deletion can no longer touch them… a download, a printed screen, a scribe scribbling a copy of your words into a cahier or a moleskin.)

A Telling

I think that is telling — will I explore it further, will I tackle those words I fear might fill the blank page? I make no promises. An author has a duty to be honest. Is silence or a blank page a form of dishonesty? Write from the heart it says, but perhaps a measure of pain is the real inhibitor, not the critic, self or otherwise.

In the Meantime

Words of encouragement for NaNoWriMo wordsmiths, from Monty Python:

On Writing and Words

what are words for? (Photo credit: Darwin Bell)

Writing allows the mind to verbalize itself…

Writing captures me
demands a commitment
something that says (not reads)
I’m black and white.

With only a ruled line
to offer guidelines
writing is fantasy
writing is reality.

Writing is the real part of fantasy
it’s down, committed, unavoidable
it’s black and white.

Writing is expression
a mind that works
outward to inward
up to down
back to front
becomes a word, a phrase, a paragraph.

And when it touches another mind
what started as vision
the mind’s inner-outer, down-up, front-back
voice
meets a stranger
caresses with words, phrases, paragraphs
to become a vision re-birthed.

Alive. Breathing. Endless.

It is in our nature to touch ourselves and each other…

A printed word allows one to return
again / again / again
to that which is
warm
cold
enlightening.

It is fuel
it is fire
it is fodder.

Words are the imagination captured
in fine form.

They last
they can be reworded over and over
and sound as fresh, as visionary
the last as the first.

The words, the writing speaks
to those who would listen
and those who would not.

Your words, your writing are the statement of self
your words, your writing are the real part of fantasy.

— Wendy Scott (I wrote the above way back in the early to mid 90’s)

Related articles

• I Just Felt Like Writing (geraldinebicettejoseph.wordpress.com)
• Don’t write your content, but have your words read themselves to your audience. (webcontentrx.typepad.com)
• I think, therefore I write. (femmeynine.wordpress.com)