I’ve sorta revamped this story, which was originally written in honor of the 200th Word of the Day story. I’m now well over 400, and I failed to commemorate that milestone several weeks ago, on account of the fact that between my network meltdown and the business of writing stories and not tracking them as well as I used to, well, I failed to realize I’d achieved that number.
Today’s Word:
niveous
As in:
“Today on the Oprah Winfrey show, our special guest is Kate Barnes, author of the phenomenal new book, ‘A Moment of Stillness,’ which has set a new record of 1,840 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But she is perhaps more well-known for ‘The Word of the Day,’ a daily piece of humorous prose in syndication and carried in over 1,500 newspapers daily. Please welcome her today.
“Kate, I must admit, that while I loved your new book, I am, first and foremost, a huge fan of your ‘Words of the Day.'”
“Thanks, Oprah, I enjoy them myself. For a long time, they were the only
creative writing I did on a regular basis. They really helped me to develop my writing habit, and forced me to spend time everyday in creative pursuits.”
“Any favorites?”
Well, I think many of my early readers would agree with me and say that one of the best stories was the one which involved this really interesting talking bird. It would tell these fantastic stories, but then one day, it was cursed with aposiopesis…”
“The breaking off in the middle of a story?”
“That’s it. It was one of the few stories that were inspired by the word
itself. Of course, others liked the disturbing, iconoclastic type of tales
like the one which described the site of Humpty Dumpty’s death like A CSI-style murder scene. Or tales where the story is inspired by current events. In one recent story, I commented on the current economic crisis, and talked about how those who’d caused the mess were rewarded, while those that had done what they should’ve done were, essentially, punished.”
“Sometimes you fill these little stories with such delightful descriptions.
One of my favorites is the description of the snow in the story you wrote
about the woman who shot the strange man looking out the window as snow is falling . Or the one about the pen dying, lonely and forgotten in the new world of word processing. They’re downright literary.”
“Thank you. Sometimes I’m inspired, especially about describing a niveous scene. There’s something pretty powerful about snow, I think.”
“How do you come up with these ideas? They are always so interesting!”
“Sometimes it’s hard. Every once in a while, I have to really stretch. I
occasionally get pretty desperate. Like when it came to the 200th word. I had to resort to that tiresome T.V. convention for a long running eries. I had to run a prose version of ‘a clip show.’ Of course, I could only use that gambit once. After that, it loses any semblance of creativity.”
*************
Yup. A prose “clip-show.” Of course, with Oprah moving to her OWN channel. I doubt I will get on her show, but, it’s nice to think big, right?
niveous: / NI-ve-ous / snowy, snowlike.