I lose most of the “Words with Friends” games I play on Facebook because I just can’t see prospective words in a pile of letters. I was never very good at the original Scrabble with the wood tiles. I wonder if they’re made out of plastic now. I’m sure I’d be doubly bad at the various sanitized versions of Scrabble that are weeding out words that aren’t politically correct.
There’s a joke floating around Facebook that shows an Ikea-style, assemble-it-your-self novel that arrives on your doorstep as a box of letters. I get nightmares thinking about it it.
I can’t speak for other writers, but I have never viewed words as collections of letters that must be assembled into what I want to say. I think of the word first and then type the letters without really noticing them. So Scrabble is the exact opposite of how my mind works. It’s embarrassing, though, because people who see writers as wordsmiths expect them to be impossible to defeat in a game about words.
I console myself by thinking that most carpenters and others who create miracles out of wood know little or nothing about the building blocks of matter. If you gave them a box of protons, neutrons, and electrons, they probably couldn’t turn them into a birdfeeder or a table. They’d be even more lost if the box contained quarks and other elementary particles.
Most craftspeople don’t make their raw materials from scratch. Writers don’t either. This is my excuse and naturally, I’m sticking to it with the determination of a covalent bond.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell
Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing
The ending I did not see coming! You think you know somebody then BAM, right out of left field it knocks you for a loop! I found Fate’s Arrows well told with several threads woven together to make it an encompassing tale of the era. It’s raw and fraught with danger. The Klan may operate differently these days, but it is still alive and well. – Big Al’s Books and Pals
Malcolm's Round Table 