Do you read the fine print? I read everything, and I love that some creative types reward people like me. For example:

Andy Wibbels offers to send his blog posts by e-mail, and when he does, it has this note at the bottom: “All Rights Reserved. Please forward to friends, colleagues, enemies and groupies. I can’t believe you actually read light grey text. You rock.”

Michael Katz’s Blue Penguin e-newsletter includes this note: “Your privacy is important to me. I never rent, sell, share or even think about your name with anybody else in the room. You may reproduce this article by including this copyright and, if reproducing it electronically, including a link to http://www.BluePenguinDevelopment.com. You must also make a loud penguin noise at noon (EST) each day while the article is in use (costume optional). No penguins were harmed in the production of this newsletter.”

Now, isn’t that better than the usual dry, boring stuff? And you get to show your personality, too!

I’ve written before about the delightful column in The Atlantic where Barbara Wallraff posts reader requests (and ideas) for words that don’t exist but should. I didn’t realize that she also has a book called Word Fugitives until my husband, knowing what a word nerd I am, got it for my birthday.

Ms. Wallraff describes a word fugitive as “a word that someone is looking for, which other people helpfully try to find or coin” and “holes in the language that dictionary words have failed to fill.” She usually lists the many variations people come up with, and then the one she likes best. Some examples:

…the word for that restless feeling that causes you to repeatedly peer into the refrigerator when you’re bored: fridgety.

…the word to describe how you hear of something for the first time and then start hearing about it everywhere: déja new.

…the word for the tendency to make more mistakes when a very critical person is watching: carper-fumble syndrome.

…the word for sending an e-mail that says a file is attached and forgetting to attach the file: forgetfileness.

Pretty clever stuff. Get it. Read it. Enjoy!

It’s funny how blogging is the first casualty when I’m up to my eyeballs in work. In the meantime, here are a few diversions:

• “Insanely interesting facts” from the Mental Floss “amazing fact generator”: http://www.mentalfloss.com/amazingfactgenerator/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2008-06-20&utm_content=Amazing-Fact-Generator. For example, every year since 1971, Nova Scotia has sent a giant evergreen to Massachusetts as thanks for sending aid after the devastating 1917 Halifax explosion. It’s the Boston Common Christmas tree.
• For the word that’s been on the tip of your tongue that you just can’t remember: http://chir.ag/phernalia/tip-of-my-tongue/.
• Find out what the heck that acronym, abbreviation or initialism means, so you can spell it out: http://www.acronymfinder.com/. Why, GUI could be Graphical User Interface, or Golfing Union of Ireland, or 58 other possible definitions; don’t keep your readers guessing!
• Create a pretty word cloud from a specific URL or a bunch of text: http://wordle.net/create. (This may only work with PCs and Explorer.)

Back to regularly scheduled blogging when the immediate panic is over.

You might think that watching Dancing with the Stars has precious little to do with writing. But as well as admiring the dancing (and watching in disbelief that Cloris Leachman is still hanging on), I took away after Monday’s show a reminder that applies to writing. You could sum it up as “It’s not all about you.”

The judges pretty much across the board scolded professional dancer Lacey Schwimmer for spending too much effort showing off her own skills and not enough making her partner, Lance Bass, look good. You might think the show is mostly about the women’s scanty costumes, but the point is really to take these non-dancers, teach them a specific dance and help them look like they know what they’re doing. Bonus points if they look graceful, elegant and polished at the same time.

Here’s what applies to writing: If I spend too much effort crafting the perfect sentence, or stretching a metaphor or trying to make a catchy headline, I’m losing sight of the point. Is the reader going to understand what the article is about?  Or am I spending too much effort trying to be clever and not enough trying to communicate?

And here I thought it was just a (so-called) “reality” show!

Astrologers who find new stars get their discoveries named after them; so do researchers identifying new diseases. Did you know that there is at least one writer who has been similarly recognized, although for a practice rather than a discovery?

I had never heard the term “tuckerization” before I encountered it reading the Mental Floss newsletter. It explained, “Many science fiction authors raise money for charity by auctioning off ‘tuckerizations,’ the inclusion of an individual’s name in a story.  The practice is named for author Wilson Tucker, who often included his friends’ names in his fiction.”

Marc Brown is another author who regular tuckerized his books. The writer and illustrator of the Arthur series of books hid the names of his two sons, Tolon and Tucker, in all but one of the books. My sons enjoyed scouring the books to find the names, which were often hidden in plain view as book titles or names of food items. We often found the names of Brown’s daughter (Eliza) and wife (Laurie), too.

If you are a word person, wouldn’t you like to have something word-related named after you?

Yesterday was Blog Action Day, where more than 9,000 bloggers had signed up to “raise awareness, initiate action and shake the web” by discussing poverty.

High housing costs often mean a decision between paying the rent and eating properly. In my community, there is a food drive going on this weekend. Volunteers dropped off bags to fill with non-perishable food, and will pick up the donations on Saturday. It could not be any easier to do than that! So far, I have one bag filled and will get a few more things on the next grocery run (not as frequent as usual, with the boys at university!).

Here’s another easy-as-pie thing to do about hunger: visit freerice.com and build your vocabulary, for which sponsors donate grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. The latest update said visitors donated 147,750,140 grains of rice yesterday. Of course while checking the site, I just had to play; it’s fairly addictive if you’re a word person! I got up to level 48 of 60 and 8,500 grains of rice before I forced myself back to work.

Appropriately enough, today is World Food Day.

I’m mad at Stephen Harper. Yes, Canada’s newly re-elected Prime Minister is still in the saddle after a useless election that he called, thinking he could turn a minority government into a majority. Although he did gain 16 more seats, he was 12 shy of the majority he wanted.

When he called this election, a year earlier than he himself had legislated, he whined about not being able to govern effectively with a minority. Now, he’s singing a different tune, saying, “We have shown that minority government can work.” Oh, please.

Voter turnout was just 59 per cent, the lowest in federal election history. Canadians were looking for our Obama, and we didn’t see him on the ballot.

Here’s a secret about a lot of writers. We have fragile egos. We crave positive feedback, and when we don’t get much (or any), we’re often struck by a feeling of “I’m not as good as [fill in name of admired author here].”

I have a Gary Larson cartoon above my desk that captures that feeling. It’s entitled “Sheep authors,” and shows a sheep at a desk throwing papers in the air; crumpled papers cover the floor and overflow a wastebasket. The sheep is saying, “Forget it! Forget it! Everything I write is just so much bleating!”

Sometimes before I sit down to write a post, I read through some of the other blogs I follow. I’m starting to find this isn’t necessarily a good way to start, because I fall into the trap of feeling not as clever, funny, smart, etc. as those admired bloggers.

Just this week I was having that feeling when I came across a post by James at Men With Pens on “How to feel consistently confident about your writing.” He says:

Those seven words [”I wish I could write like that”] can plant a dangerous seed in the mind of even the most accomplished authors, making them second-guess their abilities and wonder if they’re really cut out for this writing business after all. And what begins as a tiny sliver of self-doubt takes on a life of its own.

He has some great suggestions, including writing down every good thing anyone has ever said about your writing.  My version of this is what I call my “glory” file. There’s a paper file folder, where I put notes, cards and printouts of emailed comments. I also have an electronic file, where I copy snippets of praise to read through when I haven’t received any lately.

So taking James’ advice, I read through a few of the comments. I also looked at my sheep cartoon and smiled. OK, I feel better.

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!

Today, as always, I am thankful for my family and friends. I’m thankful for my smart, funny and handsome husband and two smart, funny, handsome sons (no bias here!). I’m thankful that our mortgage is paid off and my husband and I are both working, so watching our investments drop is painful but not as scary as it could be. I’m thankful that my parents are healthy and live close enough that we visit often, including for Thanksgiving turkey dinner. I’m thankful that I can make a living doing something I love.

There’s more but I’ll stop now. What are you thankful for?

This spring, I posted about the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. I recently found out that The Bookseller has crowned the Diagram of Diagrams, bestowing the title of Oddest Book Title among all the winners of the past 30 years.

You may be surprised to find that Bombproof your Horse and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories did not win. In second and third place, respectively, were People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead and How to Avoid Huge Ships. But the coveted crown went to Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers. Apparently, it’s a comprehensive record of a sector of Greece’s postal routes. Why, we may never know.

Besides the book titles, what I think is hilarious is that the original prize was conceived by The Diagram Group’s Bruce Robertson “as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” See what creative wonders the idle mind can accomplish?