I thought as I came across notable words from Wordnik's Word of the Day service, I'd post them here. Short and sweet. Here you go.

The Wordnik Word of the Day for September 2, 2010 is

razee

http://www.wordnik.com/words/razee

(noun) A ship of war cut down to a smaller size by reducing the number of decks.

(verb) To cut down or reduce to a lower class, as a ship; hence, to lessen or abridge by cutting out parts: as, to razee a book or an article.

'Razee' as a verb is now more commonly known as 'raze,' which comes from the Middle English, 'rasen,' which means 'to scrape off.'

Example:

"As a matter of fact the Confederate navy never had but one real man-of-war, the famous Merrimac; and she was a mere razee, cut down for a special purpose, and too feebly engined to keep the sea."

- Captains of the Civil War, by William Charles Henry Wood

Forbes published an article that lists the top 10 highest-paid authors based on the time period from June 1, 2009, through June 1, 2010. Earnings are based on the sale of books, film rights, television, gaming deals, and other income.

I reproduced the list here (or you can view Forbes' picture slide-show):

1. James Patterson ($70 million)
2. Stephenie Meyer ($40 million)
3. Stephen King ($34 million)
4. Danielle Steel ($32 million)
5. Ken Follett ($20 million)
6. Dean Koontz ($18 million)
7. Janet Evanovich ($16 million)
8. John Grisham ($15 million)
9. Nicholas Sparks ($14 million)
10. J.K. Rowling ($10 million)

Here's some tidbits I pulled from watching the slide-show:

• One out of every 17 novels bought in the U.S. are authored by Patterson.
• King is currently involved in the Haven television series on the SyFy channel which is based on his novella, The Colorado Kid. (I read The Colorado Kid and I still don't see the connection, but that was a long time ago so maybe I need to give it another read)
• Steele collected a reported $1 million from a settlement brought about by a former assistant who was convicted of embezzling $760,000 (once again proving that having lots of money isn't always a good thing; buy, hey, Steele came out $240,000 richer for her efforts)
• Koontz has produced forty-four New York Times bestsellers.
• Evanovich changed publishers when her now former publisher refused to agree to a $50 million advance that the author wanted for her next novel.
• Earlier this year Grisham's entire 23-title backlist made its digital debut as Random House e-books.
• Surprisingly, Rowling rounds out the list at the bottom. Don't feel sorry for Rowling, though; she's still a billionaire.

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For the longest time I was receiving daily Word of the Day emails from Dictionary.com. Then they stopped. It's one of those things—I was getting it for so long, usually casually glancing at the word then deleting the email, that I never really did anything when the emails started not arriving. I figured a system glitch or something.

I finally got around to looking into what's up and discovered that while my email address was still subscribed, I still wasn't getting the emails. Nothing in the spam folder, either. I tried re-subscribing, but it said I was already subscribed. OK. Unsubscribe. Subscribe again. Wait for confirmation email. Nada. OK, I'm done.

Finding another Word of the Day service was as easy as a Google search.

Wordnik, whose API I had once looked at for an unrelated project, caught my eye immediately. Their Word of the Day service requires you to sign up for an account. I did. Now, I'm once again receiving Word of the Day emails on a (surprise) daily basis.

I like the look of Wordnik's WotD page. Here's today's:

The word is big and hard to miss. Definitions are clear. The "Notes" section gives you a little bit of additional information about the word; basically stuff that falls outside of the definition itself. There are examples that use the word so you can see it in action and, in this case, a user contributed sound bite of the word's pronunciation.

If you're into this sort of thing, I recommend Wordnik's Word of the Day service. I'm also going to start using Wordnik as the definition source for my Interesting Words posts.

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This is my 300th post. Rather than turn it into a meta-post or carry on with business as usual, I thought I'd usher this 300th post in with a short list of some of my favorite quotes from the movie "300".

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Theron: [before raping Queen Gorgo] This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this. I'm not your King. / Queen Gorgo: [having stabbed Theron and while holding sword into his body] This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this. I am not your Queen!
2. Dilios: They have served the dark will of Persian kings for five hundred years. Eyes as dark as night... teeth filed to fangs... soulless. The personal guard to King Xerxes himself; the Persian warrior elite. The deadliest fighting force in all of Asia... the Immortals.
3. [Dilios is putting a patch over his eye]
   King Leonidas: Dilios, I trust that "scratch" hasn't made you useless.
   Dilios: Hardly, my lord, it's just an eye. The gods saw fit to grace me with a spare.
4. King Leonidas: Spartans! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty... For tonight, we dine in hell!
5. King Leonidas: [after the Persians ask the Greeks to give them their weapons] Come and get them!
6. Xerxes: Consider the fate of your women!
   King Leonidas: Clearly you don't know our women! I might as well have marched them up here, judging by what I've seen.
7. Queen Gorgo: Come back with your shield...or on it. [last words to her husband, Leonidas, before he and the 300 march off to Thermopylae]
8. Zeus stabs the sky with thunderbolts... and batters the Persian ships with hurricane wind. Glorious...
9. A thousand nations of the Persian empire descend upon you. Our arrows will blot out the sun. / Then we will fight in the shade.
10. It's a honor to die at your side. / It's an honor to have lived at yours.

* quotes supplied by 300 Movie Lines, Finest Quotes, and IMDB.

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My wife and I were out doing some clothes shopping this July 4th holiday weekend. Everything was going fine until my wife asked very nicely if I wouldn't mind if we stopped at just one more store. Now, we learned early on that shopping for clothes is something best done separately. While I often find what I want right away, my wife does not. Therein lies the problem. But I was ok with waiting around this time (I usually bring something to do, anyway). But then she asked if we could make a stop at another store. I cringed. This is turning into an all-day affair. I got to thinking, though… hey, there's a Half Price Books almost next door…

"No problem, honey," I said. "Let's go, and take as much time as you need."

I love Half Price Books. What's not to like about lots of books at discounted prices? It's too bad that authors and publishers are cut out of this particular profit equation, but that's one of the downsides of the traditional model (downside for them, that is).

Turns out I was able to find quite a few titles of which I'd been looking for specifically. That doesn't always happen. Must have been my lucky day. Here are the covers of those books:

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As I've been spelling out at the top of each of my recent book reviews, I'm taking LibraryThing's 50 Book Challenge for 2010. The reason LibraryThing is doing this is to, of course, promote reading. I don't know that I necessarily need the extra incentive, but I also can't deny that the challenge coupled with my Kindle, given to me as Christmas present by my wife, has dramatically increased my reading.

So, how am I doing so far?

The goal is 50 books read. I'm currently at 17. Fifty books is about one per week. So, given that for the year thus far we've seen 19 weeks (I'm starting from Sunday, January 3rd), I should have read 19 books by now. Looks like I'm currently two short. But that's not a big deal. Given that I'll be taking some time off work and will have some holidays here and there, I should be able to make up a small deficit like that.

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How long would it take to write a novel if you wrote 1,000 words/day? 500? 100? How about three sentences per day? How long would that take?

I'm going to figure out some answers here. I'll start with the basic assumption that the length of a complete novel is 100,000 words. At 250 words/page, that's a 400 page book.

Let's see how long it would take to complete the first draft, sans edits, given varying rates of words put down on paper per day. I'll assume a completely arbitrary 20 words per sentence and, from that, 12.5 sentences/page (250 words/page divided by 20 words/sentence).

Starting at the ridiculous and ending with, well, the ridiculous again, you can see that were you to only write 1 word/day it would take 100,000 days or 274 years to finish a novel length manuscript. Something a little more realistic—3 sentences/day, of which I've heard of writers doing—and you're at 4.5 years. If you strive for the more often recommended 1,000 words/day, it will take you .27 years or just over 3 months. Pause for a second and think about that. My first reaction was: What?! Why has it taken me so long then to finish this bleep'in novel? That just can't be right…

But it is.

If you can write 1,000 words per day, you'll have a 100,000 words in 100 days. A complete first draft, in other words.

It sounds easy. So why isn't it? The reasons are legion: life gets in the way, we procrastinate, we edit/rewrite before we should, the writing itself leads us down dead-ends from which we have to back ourselves out. Anyone's who's ever attempted to write a novel, whether you failed or not, knows about these things. It takes a lot of discipline to keep pushing forward, especially when you know what you just wrote is crap and is going to need some serious re-writing.

But therein lies the gist of it: you have to keep moving forward if you want to reach the end. It sounds simple. If only it really were.

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