Trying to write and making good progress on that. Words are always just words to me, but I've had to field a few of the challenges with how I choose and show the words I want, in the way I want. Here are some of them, and then an observation:
Foreign Language words: Looks like I will be going with italics and the authentic spellings in the language of the word, and then explaining the meaning in English as the paragraph continues. Too many things were ending up in quotation marks that weren't dialogue. This is better.
Thesaurus Fishing: Sometimes I found I was repeating the same word every time it was a close fit to what the sentence needed. That could get boring to read in a hurry, so when I caught that happening, it was off to the Thesaurus for a synonym. Not shy about doing that, even with my extremely large vocabulary in English. As said elsewhere, don't go for biggest or most grandiloquent word. Simply get some variety out in the text.
Watch your TLA's: The old MilSpeak problem of acronyms and alpha-number mixed designations for things showed up in a couple of places. When they do, you have got to stop and spell them out once. Those are a bigger problem in techno-thrillers than the style of espionage thriller I write, but they still happen. Oh, to demonstrate in this very blog post, "TLA" isn't some secret mission codename; it means "Three Letter Acronym", the most common of the military and government short-hand notations.
and an observation:
With Chapter 10 of the new novel underway, but a sense of being late anyway, this is a rough summary of my non-writing vocabulary right now...
this art sourced from here. apparently a t-shirt design.
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