The Color Thesaurus

Ingrid's Notes

I love to collect words. Making word lists can help to find the voice of my story, dig into the emotion of a scene, or create variety.

One of my on-going word collections is of colors. I love to stop in the paint section of a hardware store and find new names for red or white or yellow.  Having a variety of color names at my fingertips helps me to create specificity in my writing. I can paint a more evocative image in my reader’s mind if I describe a character’s hair as the color of rust or carrot-squash, rather than red.

So for fun, I created this color thesaurus for your reference. Of course, there are plenty more color names  in the world, so, this is just to get you started.

Fill your stories with a rainbow of images!

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What can we do with videos in the blog

Auster’s black Babushka: The Book of Illusions

I have bought Babushka dolls in three ex-Soviet block places: Prague, Vilnius and Sofia. With their bright shiny paint, curvy heads fitting perfectly into each other, one hiding within the other, the dolls are defiant little rebels in the face of the chill Totalitarian aesthetic, artistically at least.. Politically they were spies, collaborators and underground imperial colonisers. How irritating that tourists buy souvenirs of imperial Russia.

Which brings me to Auster, where not a single development of plot is to be trusted. You just know it’ s a question of time  before he will deconstruct it. But readers are tourists in Auster’s republic, they buy what he sells, no matter what it is. Stories within stories. Revolving around a theme. Three murders. Several suicides. Two protagonists whose perceptions and narration we are constantly lead to doubt. In the book art is truer than life. And destruction becomes more noble than creation. Plenty to discuss. A very black Babushka.

Alice

A Constant Companion

Is it dogs or books are supposed to be constant companions? With three children and a husband, you would think  that there would not be too much time for solace. But you would be wrong. When you are a serial insomniac there’s a whole load of time for solace. That’s why there are always three  unread books, stacked on my bedside table. In the dead of the night and to the dawn chorus, that’s when books are your very best friends.

I can date exactly when sleep became an occasional luxury: November 18th 1999. That’s when my dad died. His bedside table was always full of books. Bibles, mysteries and science fiction. The Shroud of Turin hit all three genres and it often made the bedside. He would go to bed early, probably to get away from the noise. That was the nine of us. But you could visit him for quality time: consultations about geometry, chats in Irish, discussions about projects. If you were sick or something serious was bothering you, he would honour you with a visit.

In Wonderland, Alice falls asleep. Into a deep, deep sleep.

Alternative Alice.

PISA report Liiteracy Spain

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses and compares kids from all over. It does this every 3 years. It analyses core skills: mathematics, reading and science. You can check out the league tables on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment
in 2000 Irish kids, for example, come in at no.5 in terms of reading literacy, Spanish kids are at 18. In 2006, Spain’s score in literacy went down. Finland comes out top in everything. At more than one congress, and not without some sour grapes, I’ve heard teachers from here comment, yes but the suicide rate in Finland is awful. Next report is due in Autumn 2010. Book buying stats are low here too. The theory on this from my Irish friends is, people here are too stingy to buy them. No doubt people here spend generously on food or clothes.
Why is literacy here less than optimum? Type of Testing? Education system? Zapatero attributes it more to culture, to the isolation of recent Spanish history.
Whatever the past, whatever the present, for the future, Spanish babies need a staple diet of bottle, cereal and baby bath books. Kids should be eating them before they can read them…
Alice

The Guardian Book Club

Nelli recommended it. Interviews, podcasts, reviews, events in the book world, on-line debating… It’s a giant. Well worth a Sunday visit. And a galaxy away from a personal blog like this. It’s so… massive. The Guardian Book Club. Internet invites and intimidates once again.

I guess we could do much worse than follow that page.

Today I finished my Jodie Picoult. A good read. And right at the end, I discovered them. Questions for discussion. Especially for book clubs. Finally, on to Paul Auster.

Alice

Bookworm

High up in the attic in my mother’s house there was some graffiti on a wall. It was written in white chalk and could easily have been wiped off. But nobody did. It was there for thirty years. The words stayed there hidden behind boxes of left-over wallpaper and old school books. Nobody ever read their message. Except me on my visits home, when I went up to check they were still there. The white words on the dark wooden wall screamed: Bookworm and Four-eyes. The graffiti referred to me. I knew it for a fact and I knew the author very well.

Who could have written such insults? Well now that it has finally been painted over, I can reveal the culprit. The nasty little rebel  dealing in insults about me was myself.. An eight-year-old in possession of a stick of chalk is capable of anything. Almost as much as a grown-up with a blog. And I’m still a four-eyed book worm.

A name for the club

Will we have uniforms? And badges? We could call ourselves the Little Fascist Book Club. Or how about the Bourgoisies?

Only one requisite: serial. Readers not killers.

Why a blog?

We could debate our little hearts away online and just blog everything out. But I very much hope not. Afterall most of us, with the exception of the Chesire Cat, are generally visible and have skin. So hopefully there will be sun glinting on wine and steam coming from coffee as we discuss text, context and subtext, meaning, explicit and implicit .

We could have an earnestly practical blog, with dates and times and lists. What else?

Google and Book Clubs

If you google book clubs, you get a trillion clubs. In fact if you google almost anything you get a trillion of it. It’s rather off-putting. This is why I always do first and google later and not vice versa.
There are books published on book clubs (this seems a little reflexive), online guides, how-to, five steps, do’s and don’ts, forums, and yes of course blogs; plenty of people are already there. Online instructions and activities. We’re in numerous perhaps even good company: Oprah, the Guardian, the BBC.

Today I checked out:

http://www.Book-Clubs-Resource.com

Some good tips indeed to be found amid suggestions that are perhaps a little more self evident. The best of suggestions to be found were in the discussion questions question, where I particularly liked the one where everyone comes to the meeting with a question.

We of course have chosen a book for which I could find no ready-made guide. But I feel a about ready-made guides a little like I do about Google. It seems that the real fun is in deciding what to ask.