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Countdown to Publication for “The Dictionary of Curious Words”
A Stressful Wait!
You may ask “What’s the ‘stressful wait’?” Quite honestly, The Dictionary of Curious Words has the largest word count of anything I’ve ever written. It’s so large that I am unable to manage it for proofreading and editing myself. So I’m paying to have each volume professionally edited. That’s where the stress is mostly coming from. It seems like a waste when it’s something that I could do myself if I just make myself do it one part at a time. The first volume is 54,804 words. Will I feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth? Will I be able to say “I’ve learned what to avoid in the future?”
Today, I thought of all I spent financially to build my chickens their backyard home. So paying to have their new book home professionally edited feels like giving them a nicer and more desirable home in someone’s heart and on someone’s bookshelf where they will all outlive me and do more to change the world for the better than I ever can.
The other ‘stressful wait’ is from finishing the interior illustrations. They have to be black and white and most are being done without any preliminary sketches or plans. They are very time-consuming. As far as time lines are concerned, the professional editor promised he will have his work for us completed by May 3rd, which is two weeks away. My expected publication date for the first Volume, Into the Garden, is about a month away because I want to have a copy in my hands to ensure it is as good as possible before making it available for sale. I will be letting you know exactly when it is available.
As far as the interior illustrations are concerned, they will be images of actual pages of Nate’s Dictionary of Curious Words notebook, journal, and assorted paper ephemera (like maybe tickets to Pearl’s Comedy Show).
You can read more about those tickets here and see an example a notebook dictionary page illustration:
These items would have been carefully preserved, perhaps in a shoebox, and they will be either pages that list words in the Chicken language or pages that explain how the Chicken language rules work.
So rather than sharing story chapters with you this week, I thought it might be enjoyable to take a look at some of the Chicken Language Secret rules and some words that go with those rules. (I have a sneaky feeling that understanding similarities between the Chicken language and one’s own language, like English, might be helpful.)
Here they are in full color (without any of the cartoon illustrations like you’ve seen in recent newsletters from us):
And here they are in Black and White (since the novel must be printed in B&W due to number of pages):
Please note that I am not a lexicographer by training, but I do play the part of one when writing about Nate. These pages require a different kind of editing and proofreading which I will be doing myself to make sure that the language is logical and beautiful and comes from the heart. In other words, reflective of all the best qualities of my chickens.
In our Substack GraciePress Newsletter, we have the option of including a poll to gather the opinions of readers. But here on Medium you can just leave a comment, and we would definitely value your feedback.
However, if you’d like to do the survey questions, just go here:
It’s okay to record your thoughts and opinions there on Substack instead of here on Medium.
Do you think these pages from Nate’s notebooks add value to the story?
For this first question, I’m interested in knowing if these pages add value to the story such as through enjoyment, believability, improved curiousness, or perhaps an appreciation of different languages and the people who speak them.
As you were making sense of these pages, did you go from “rules to words” or “words to rules”?
This next question is getting at how you best thought about learning the language of chickens. Did you go from “Rules to Words” (knowing what rule to follow and then looking for words that followed that rule…such as knowing the rules for making plurals in your own language and then finding examples that fit the rules) or from “Words to Rules” (seeing the similarities in words, thinking about their meanings, and then knowing the rules that makes them similar…such as seeing a list like: apples, melons, grapes, seeds and then knowing “s” at the end means more than one of something.
I’m sure there are fancy names for these two kinds of thinking, but they have slipped my mind. Inductive Reasoning and Deductive Reasoning seems to have slipped back in to my brain. Basically it’s a question about which to put first “Language Secret” notebook pages or Chicken Words” notebook pages. Nate went from “Words to Rules” because he wrote down the words he heard and then tried to make sense of them. But that was in a fiction character, not as a fiction reader (like you.)
Where should these pages be?
And finally what seems like the best place to put these pages? Anywhere is possible, and I am leaning a bit to having them in a separate volume, especially if printed in full color.
There is one very horrible Chicken Dictionary for sale on Amazon which makes chickens seem absolutely stupid, and we will not have that! There was no creativity involved. It’s just a list of words from an English dictionary with the word “cluck” for how to say it in the Chicken Language.
Fun Fact: In the six years that chickens have been living in my back yard, I have never heard a single one of them say “cluck.”
(Remember that Nate is trying to pass this off as a real dictionary with real words, their meanings, and their rules of grammar so as not to make his Uncle angry or have any evidence to support his assumption that Nate is irresponsible and unable to make it in the “real world of men.”)
Until Next Time
Thank you for reading!
John, Gracie, Bessie, Blanche, Pearl, Emily, and Amelia
