Author: Jeanne Lombardo

The Ever-Extending Publishing Timeframe

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

Manuscript

The Book’s going to Be Published When?

It’s been nearly three years since I accepted the challenge of ghostwriting a life story for a client. Now, with numerous revisions and versions and one failed publication deal under my belt, I realize three grave mistakes that, had I avoided them, would have made my experience a little easier.

I wrote on my previous blog Memoir Crafter of an early difficulty I encountered in developing the structure of the story, that being the differing expectations of my client and his wife. My client simply wanted his “story to be heard.” His wife wanted a “legacy for the family.” So, what was this book going to be, autobiography or memoir?

With such a basic compass, by late 2013 I had produced a 97,000-word manuscript that my client was pleased with. It told his life story in a straightforward, chronological fashion, from postwar refugee to immigrant to renowned spinal neurosurgeon. I did a short (four months) agent search, got a dozen respectable rejections and one good bite from a New York agent, who also passed on it. All along, I kept hearing similar comments about the book’s genre being amorphous, and about the difficulty of publishing what was essentially an autobiography.

With a Little Help from My Friends (Sigh)

In stepped a good friend, a dear friend, a friend whose generosity knows no bounds. She suggested she push the book with the independent publisher for whom she edited mostly YA fiction, and with whom she had developed a close friendship. It wasn’t exactly the right kind of publisher, but it was one with a decent stable of authors. Time was passing. My client hungered for that physical manifestation of his story. On his approval, I relayed his acceptance of the publisher’s offer mid- 2014 and off we went. We were all set to hold book in hand by late 2014 or the spring of 2015.

While we were finalizing the contract and working with a designer on the cover of the book, the publisher recommended my client find a publicist. That was a ball out of left field, but I did a search and found what looked like a good one in New York. The publicist and I clicked over the phone. She read the entire manuscript (on her own time), provided suggestions for some broad edits, sketched out a proposal for a promotional campaign, and came to an agreement with my client. All that remained was to put the publicist in contact with whomever was going to handle promotion at the publisher. That, it turned out, would be my friend.

We’re Friends, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Things seemed to be moving along, but I was a little concerned. I had never even talked to the publisher, who, from the stories I had heard, seemed mercurial at times regarding her business. All I knew about her was that my friend had fallen into editing for her when my friend’s own book got picked up some years earlier. At various stages along the way my friend even seemed to be in a kind of mentoring relationship with this woman who was paying her to edit all submissions.

And, though she knew a great deal about “grassroots” efforts, promotion was not exactly a specialty of my friend’s. She had been feeding me guidelines for months on what to do for my client: set up readings at public libraries; contact local media and newspapers for interviews; hawk the book at book fairs, and a dozen other labor-intensive activities. But did she know how to work with a professional publicist? It was the publisher, after all, who recommended my client go that route. At any rate, I was relieved that my client was willing to invest in a publicist. The emails my friend was sending me about the process were so long they made my head spin.

At the end of the year,  I decided it was time to offload this piece of the project to the two parties concerned: the publicist and the publisher. I provided email addresses and phone numbers to all concerned: the publicist, the owner/publisher and my friend the editor.

Stop the Presses!

A few days later, I received a frantic voice mail from the publicist followed by an equally frantic email. Who was this publisher, she wanted to know. Who exactly was in charge of book promotion? She deemed the publisher a backwater start-up not far removed from a Print-On-Demand operation. She resented my poor friend’s suggestions, in the form of mammoth emails; she deemed them geared for do-it-yourself authors and entirely unsuitable for the professional she was . She felt my client’s book warranted something better. She could not work with this publisher. She highly recommended my client and I  back out of the contract.

Of course I had to relay this happy news to my client. And to my friend. My client was gracious about it, though he had to pay a fee for breaking the contract. My friend was gracious too, but had to deal with the disappointment of the publisher. The two of them eventually parted ways over it.

Silver Linings?

That took place at the end of 2014. It was a setback, but now we were free to move the whole process to a new, hopefully more commercial level. That began in earnest when the publicist recommended a professional editor to my client, who approved the next step.  I began to work with this editor in February.

So, where is the book at this point? In transition. That very first problem with genre never did go away. The editor sees an entirely different kind of book from the one I originally wrote. She wants to sell a straight medical memoir, not some hybrid of immigrant story cum medical memoir. The prospect of deconstructing the existing manuscript and, Frankenstein-like, creating a new creature from the necessary dismemberment, is both disheartening and galvanizing.

Stay tuned for notes and lessons learned from the major operation now underway!

 

 

 

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 5

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FullSizeRender

Word of the Week 5: Bray

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week I am backtracking five months to revisit possibly the best book I have read in the last half decade: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed’s acclaimed and joltingly poignant memoir of confronting both an untamed land and her own wild heart.

At twenty-six, still mourning the untimely death of her counter-culture mother, and burdened with a series of wrong steps and bad decisions, the author embarks on a grueling journey of self-discovery and healing. Woefully unprepared, she sets out to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest trail—alone—from the Mohave Desert in California, through Oregon, to the Colombia River Gorge in southern Washington.

It is an amazing adventure; but this is not simply an adventure story. Rather, through seamlessly integrated flashbacks, we witness nothing short of a catharsis, of redemption through pain, of transcendence through struggle.

At the heart of that struggle is not only the young woman’s ultimate acceptance  of the loss of her mother to cancer at the age of forty-six, but her forgiveness of the way her mother lived her life. It is in a final passage on this theme that, in a howl of futility and rage, the author lends to this week’s mundane word a new, searing power to move.

“And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over keening, while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat.”

Wild is one of the most heart-wrenching, skillfully constructed, lyrical, honest, and successfully realized memoirs I’ve come across in years. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear how it affected you.

And, if you’ve encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week, consider sharing it here.

Flash Fiction: A Rich Little Poor Girl

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

lake-pend-oreile-cruise-may-21-31

It’s flash fiction time as I ponder another challenge from Carrot Ranch. Charli’s May 27, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story, using the above photo. You can make it a garden party or an international spy thriller. Who is there and why? Does the backdrop scenery make an impact or is it ignored? The place is on an island, if you wish to make use of that. Go where the photograph leads you this week.

The stunning locale first suggested a tale of romantic suspense, like those so beautifully evoked by mistress of the genre Mary Stewart in The Moonspinners or This Rough Magic. A boat landing on a remote mountain estate seemed a perfect setting for a flash about a chance meeting between a smart, independent (and yes, attractive) young woman and a generic tall, handsome, initially-suspect-but-ultimately-kind-and-sympathetic love interest. After all, it was authors like Stewart and Victoria Holt, whom I read voraciously through my teens, that compelled me to pursue my own foreign and romantic adventures upon reaching the age of burning freedom myself.

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But then, a real-life story came to mind.

I heard the tale last July in Florida during a visit to a long-lost cousin of my husband’s. We’ll call him Billy. Affable, hard-drinking Billy had done very well for himself, not only in his career as an attorney but in his marriage to a wealthy sparrow of a woman with camellia skin and fair wispy curls, whom we shall call Savannah. On the patio of their luxury home, after a dip in the saltwater pool, I listened with deep fascination to Savannah’s story.

She had not been born into wealth. Rather, the youngest of seven children in a hardscrabble West Virginia family headed by a down-and-out alcoholic widower, the trajectory of her life had been radically redirected when a rich, local attorney adopted her as a young child. Overnight penury and hunger and squalor gave way to the privilege and trapping of a lonely, wealthy man’s only child.

Savannah never returned to the shack she’d shared with her rag-tag siblings, only visiting her father a few times before his death two decades later. Still, her wealth had not brought great happiness, or a love deepened by shared struggle, or health. Savannah told me her story in a thin whisper, conserving the breath now imperiled by her lung cancer. And during the six hours we spent there, Billy followed up on the libations he’d clearly imbibed before our arrival, downing beer after beer after beer.

The Lake House

Savannah surfaced and gulped the sweet, heavy air. It’s a dream, she thought. This lake, the blue mountains, the murmurings in the pines and skimming dragonflies.

She bobbed for a moment, then hoisted herself up the metal ladder. No, it was real, these wooden stairs, this path, the big house just ahead.

Clean, sweet-smelling New Papa was waiting there. She didn’t know why Real Papa had let New Papa take her away after Mama died. Or why New Papa hadn’t chosen one of the others.

A prayer beat inside her. Let me stay. Let me stay. Let me stay.

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 4

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Into Thin Air

Word of the Week 4: Laggard(ly)

Welcome back to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Jon Krakauer’s harrowing and controversial account of the disastrous 1996 ascent of Mount Everest, Into Thin Air.

Contracted by Outside magazine to join and write an article about a guided ascent of Mount Everest in May of that year, Krakauer got much more than he bargained for when a wicked convergence of circumstances—human error, poor judgment, and damnably bad luck with the weather—conspired to bring about the worst mountaineering disaster on record. By the time he descended to Base Camp, nine climbers from four expeditions had perished, three more would succumb shortly, and at least two were left severely maimed from frostbite.

What makes Krakauer’s account so grippingly enjoyable is not only his insider’s informed take on alpine climbing, but his Valkyrian (another great word employed in this book) command of the language. Here, in a passage describing a second attempt to reach Camp Three, is this week’s example:

“A thousand feet up the immense slant of the Lhotse Face, I ascended a faded nylon rope that seemed to go on forever, and the higher I got, the more laggardly I moved.”

Having pulled this book off my shelf for a quick study in grabbing the reader’s attention from the first paragraph, filling in historical and personal detail without bogging down into an “information dump,” and crafting dynamic and memorable characters, my earlier hunch that this was a book to be savored once a decade was reaffirmed.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “laggard” or “laggardly,” or other words like it. Comment here if you are not feeling too laggardly yourself.

The Writing Life: Sublime Transports and Ethical Pitfalls

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Mark Twain
“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”          Mark Twain

Ah the writing life, the pure enjoyment of words and language, the sense that we have set out on some hallowed road trodden before us by our greatest literary precursors. My small efforts pale in the brilliance of those luminaries, and yet, I too can aspire to strike against a small truth, brush against what the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom, in his new book, The Daemon Knows,  calls “the strong ­transports of sublimity.” After all, as Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. “

So I gather up my journals, written over the course of three decades, scan them for gems that may still glow. I delve into nesting folders on old flash drives for half-finished stories and books in the hopes that one or two may call out to be made whole. I take satisfaction in having written a book for someone else. I blog, explore flash fiction and mini memoirs; pen book reviews; pass on my own hard-won writing tips. I count myself a fringe member of a noble literary fraternity (or, as Virginia would have it, sorority).

Then I come up against harsh Necessity. Most of my writing tasks do not pay the bills.

That makes writing a brilliant late career choice, since one of my favorite things to worry about is money. I don’t blame the wagons to which I have hitched myself; what does one expect from artists, musicians and philosophers? Even the one money man I married denied me the security I sought, playing the markets as he did with a reckless alacrity. I blame myself. Money and I have always been in an on-again off-again relationship. Maybe it’s the frisson of unease I crave.

This week, a client’s late payment sent me into a fit of money angst. Words like “insolvency” and “penury” knocked against my rattled brain (ridiculous, I know, for a rather firmly entrenched bourgeoise.) Feeling impotent, I importuned the oracle of the Internet for wise counsel. I googled and yahooed the magic SEO tags, “writing jobs”; “freelance writing”; etc. One article on Careers in Writing from Britain’s the Guardian gave me hope that I might at least fashion a small career as a hack. Two others I found at Freelance Writing Jobs invited submission of a cover letter and resume. Desperate for some sort of action, I spent a precious couple of hours conjuring up the dead language of old job applications.

The next morning I got a reply and a link from a site named “Writers Careers” inviting me to interview over Skype. I should have known from the labels that had attracted me—”scholarly,” “academic”—”that it was a paper mill disguised as a freelance writing resource. Why I should find such deception shocking eludes me, since getting round the rules—”cheating—”has become the modus operandi of our age. Still, as an educator, life-long student and writer, I consider such “services” an egregious affront not just to the clients who so easily barter the development of their mental faculties for a passing grade, and their teachers, who are being swindled out of precious time and effort, but to anyone who cares about writing as a vocation and a profession.

So, I tip my hat to the struggle that is eking out an essay or story or blog post one word and one line at a time. I may scrape along financially; I may in the long run harvest a negative return on my efforts. But at least I won’t sell my hard-won research and writing skills as so much pulp for the mill. Hell, I’ll even look beyond the small securities of business writing and editing. After all, as Edmund White quipped, “It always seemed much better to be a writer—a Real Writer—than a successful hack.”

Wednesday Word of the Week 3

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TheMidwichCuckoos

Word of the Week 3: Nugatory

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading. (And note that I am not providing the definitions here in the hopes that 1) readers may already recognize the word, or 2) readers will be stimulated to look it up after attempting first to identify the meaning from context.)

This week I am reminded of the literature I read in my teens and early twenties, what academics refer to as the “canon”: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, Anthony Trollope, the Romantic poets. How I thrilled to the language, the phrasings, the settings (moors and heaths and bowling-greens; manors, coach houses and lodges). Later I pilgrimaged even farther back to Milton and Pope, William Blake and John Donne, all those illustrious pillars over which towers the greatest of them all—Shakespeare.

Twentieth-century British literature later offered equally satisfying linguistic gems, not to mention psychological insights. I won’t tally them here but as a quick example take the wicked wit of Evelyn Waugh or the randy, cutting humor of Kingsley Amos. Brilliant story-tellers all, but for me, not the least of the pleasure derived from reading British literature has been the “smashing” command of the mother tongue, the rich complex phrasings, and the delightful and unexpected variety of word choice.

Which brings me to this week’s book, from 1957, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Beynon Harris, written under the pseudonym of John Wyndham. Readers may be familiar with the film version of this classic science fiction tale, Village of the Damned. (This is not the place to decry Hollywood’s maddening habit of substituting strategically coined book titles with sensationalistic schlock; still it must be noted that the infiltrating habits of the cuckoo birds provide an important analogy.)

On an ordinary fall day in the sleepy postwar English village of Midwich, a mysterious phenomenon renders the entire population unconscious for one day. Aerial surveillance reveals a cigar-shaped silvery craft situated smack in the center of the zone affected, which disappears as the effects wear off. Shortly thereafter, all the women of child-bearing age discover themselves pregnant. When the children born of this presumed xenogenesis exhibit frightening shared traits, central citizens of the town must confront the terrifying possibility of an alien invasion designed to destroy Western civilization from within.

American SF writer Damon Knight excoriated the book for its “layers of polite restraint, sentimentality . . . and women’s-magazine masochism,” but for me, these elements paint a rich portrait of English village life on the threshold of obsolescence. Altogether, they present a reading experience that is refreshingly un-PC and add a bit of “jolly good fun” to the chilling plot.

It’s just one of those chauvinistic elements that gives us today’s example.

The Reverend Leebody, determined that the radio program he is listening to on the “Pre-Sophoclean Conception of the Oedipus Complex” should not be drowned out by the “piffle” of his wife Dora’s telephone conversation, advances the volume knob another five degrees.

“He could not be blamed for failing to guess that what now struck him as a particularly nugatory exchange of feminine concerns would subsequently prove to be of importance.”

Thanks to my husband, aka The Professor, for suggesting yet another great novel from his always-evolving List of Best Science Fiction Novels.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “nugatory.” Perhaps I could think of one employing it in an observation of my male relatives’ propensity for endless ESPN viewing.

 

A Dawn Concert for Margaret

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 5 Comments
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Margaret: An indomitable spirit.

Margaret Egger Belisle was her name. Loyal wife, loving mother of five, dedicated nurse, rheumatoid arthritic. She suffered from her illness from just after my birth in the mid 1950s until her death in 1975 at the age of 53.

While I was growing up, I was oblivious to the harsh reality of her condition. It was just was the normal state of affairs. By the time my memories began to stick, she already relied on a cane. Then crutches. When the first wheelchair appeared, it was a hoot to take it for a spin down the hallway of our ranch-style home. Apart from those aids, she was like other working mothers I knew. Off she went to care for her geriatric patients every morning at the nursing home she had established with my father in 1967.

Mother’s disease followed its due trajectory through my high school years, reaching its pitch just as freedom sounded its shrill whistle most insistently in my ear. I was a freshman in college by then, commuting to class from home. I longed to move away. But Mother was still at home, deteriorating in front of our eyes. Not that RA takes a person quickly; it dawdles, inflaming another knuckle here, twisting another joint there, conspiring with a wicked cocktail of drugs to render the body a desiccated skeleton draped in swollen, mottled flesh.

It was the first stroke that put her out of commission. It hit her at dinner. One moment she was hunched at the end of the table forcing down spaghetti. The next, the left side of her body went slack, she slumped, and food fell from her open mouth. Two more strokes followed, successively robbing her of her few remaining comforts: reading, speaking, sharing meals. Like the first two, the third one cruelly refused to deliver the merciful coup de grace.

She languished in the family nursing home through the long summer before my sophomore year at college. I grew accustomed to her limbo state. Like the rest of the family, I visited, but I grew careless, even callous. I wanted to be out in the world, not sitting in that sterile room watching the arthritis tighten the screws, watching her wince with every small shift, trying to decipher her garbled speech. After one visit, I sat in my car in the parking lot raging at God for his abject cruelty. Why, why, why wouldn’t he take her?

The last time I saw her alive may have been the visit that coincided with my brother Jack’s janitorial shift at the nursing home. Jack was the big man of the family. He had been Mother’s arms and legs for several years, lifting her in and out of her wheelchair and bed, in and out of the car. Jack made sure to see her everyday, stopping in several times on his rounds. When he saw me sitting there, he lit in. “Where have you been?” he said angrily. “When was the last time you came down to see her? Your mother’s dying and you can’t be bothered to get your ass down here?”

I think I shot up and went at him, lobbing fervid excuses in my defense, my fervor growing in proportion to my guilt. Then we both heard a distressed, even indignant, sound coming from her bed. I turned. Her hand was raised, her finger pointing at me. Her eyes flashed the old spirited anger. Clearly articulating the words, she said, “I like you.”

Jack got his reward though. The only one down at the nursing home the morning she died, he was the last to see her alive. But even he wasn’t at her side when she breathed her last; he had slipped out to mop another floor. It breaks my heart that she died without Dad or any of her children at her bedside, but it would be even sadder if it weren’t for one small detail. Once we’d all assembled there, it was plain to see. Gone were the traces of pain that had gripped her face for so long. Instead, a peaceful smile graced her lips.

It’s too late now to make amends to my mother. How I wish I could sit by her side now, read to her, play music for her, take her mottled, broken dove of a hand in my own and hold it. But I can’t. I can only roll the memories and regrets around in my head. I can only belatedly offer apologies to the air.

This post was prompted by Charli Mills’s May 13, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that shows a hard place and a connection.

A Dawn Concert

Four a.m. The pain a staccato knock. No going back to sleep. She pushed up on gnarled hands, scooted, let the sharp ache push her into the wheelchair.

She followed the grooves in the carpet, pushed past the girls’ rooms, imagined their young bodies. They looked like her, thirty years ago, before the arthritis made a crippled birch of her.

She parked at the kitchen table. No coffee until Dan rose to percolate it. She waited.

At last a pale lemony light washed through the window. The familiar room emerged. And the concert began.

The robins never forsook her.

 

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 2

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WhenTheAirHitsYourBrain

Word of the Week 2: Pummel

Welcome to my second post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick, Jr., M.D, a captivating yet shockingly funny account of the author’s neurosurgical residency.

Dr. Vertosick may belong to the rarest breed of doctors, but with his blue-color background, the story he tells is one of an everyman confronted with extraordinary challenges: the deaf, mute, obese, nicotine-addicted “trisomy 21” (i.e. Down Syndrome) patient; the stunningly beautiful, pregnant, fundamentalist Christian with a brain tumor who refuses chemotherapy to save her baby; the young female car-accident victim with both a fractured skull and a perforated heart; the infant with water on the brain.

It is in describing one of these patients, a young Nigerian foreign exchange student with a dramatic case of MS, that Dr. Vertosick wins his place in this post. After recounting how the young man’s arms and legs become uncontrollable, “flailing about like octopus tentacles,” he conjures up a powerful image of the effects of this terrible disease by using a word commonly employed in a very different context.

“His face was swollen from attempts to brush his teeth, attempts which resulted only in a self-inflicted pummeling.”

I am not sure what I expected when I delved into the genre of medical memoir, but it was hardly the brilliant metaphors, surpassingly poignant reflections on life, illness and death, and skillfully rendered characters that make When the Air Hits Your Brain a page turner to the last period. And while the book makes one glad for dedicated physicians like Dr. Vertosick, it also provokes some regret that the doctor is not a full-time author.

How might you use the word “pummel” in a context unrelated to fighting? Can you think of a similar example of a word used in a wildly different context from the one in which it is usually employed? What’s your word of the week? Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Beppu: A Flash Memoir for Spring

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments
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A view of Beppu, Oita, Kyushu, Japan

Spring always pulls me back to 1988, a pivotal year in my life. It was the year of change, of pulling up stakes, cutting ties, forsaking my stable landed existence for a leap into the unknown. It was glorious.

I had been living in Los Angeles for eight years. My initially enchanting if bohemian neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, had deteriorated, become the scene of racial confrontations and sad decline.

The relationship I was in similarly suffered. Having recently crossed over from my carefree twenties into the tick-tock thirties, the latent issue of babies awoke and set to screaming. I had never wanted them, or so I had asserted, had chosen my mate (an artist) not only for the mad love he inspired in me but upon the basis of a shared commitment to freedom, the pursuit of art, and childlessness.

But in crept my doubts. My dissatisfactions. At the same time I asked myself, if I was foregoing children, why was I locked into an arrangement that felt so confining?

What then? I had always had a wanderlust. My career as an ESL teacher had promised ripe opportunities before: sweet apples I had failed to pluck, had left to rot on the tree.

But now another fruit fell into my open palm. Sweeter than I had any right to expect. A teaching position in Japan. And not a job at one of those fly-by-night, exploitative, street-front language joints in Tokyo or Osaka, but a lecturer’s position in English at a college in the hot spring fairyland of a place called Beppu.

My decision on whether to eat that sweet fruit or let it remain unplucked changed the course of my future.

This post is my response to Charli Mills’s May 6, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that is a snapshot of spring…We could think of it as “spring eternal.” Warm, renewing, new life, hope.

Currency Exchange

He sat in the chair, vigilant, funereal.

“The taxi’s below,” she said. “I’ll call when I get there tomorrow.”

He didn’t rise. She gathered the last bags and closed the door behind her.

Freedom revved in her chest, maintained its thrum through traffic and customs. On the plane she exhaled into a blissful inaccessibility. Not even his voice could intrude now. Already he seemed far away.

She deplaned at Narita, boarded the island hopper to Kyushu. On the descent, she peered out the window. April sunlight glinting on the Inland Sea was a newly minted coin, just for her spending.

Wednesday Word of the Week 1

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments

Word of the Week 1: Yokelry

Welcome to my debut post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s 1953 alternative history in which the Confederacy won the “War of Southron Independence” after the surrender of the United States of America in 1864.

The year is 1940. Barbara, a brilliant beautiful physicist, cold-hearted cynic, and emotionally volatile polyandrist, has Hodge, the country rube of a protagonist and budding historian, in her grip. When Hodge questions the viability of Barbara’s scheme to translate matter-energy into terms of space-time, thus making time travel possible, Barbara strikes back with a typically brittle and demeaning observation:

“Thank you. It’s always nice to know one has amused the yokelry.”

Ouch! Kudos to the author, Ward Moore. I had not read him before but reveled in the power of his  Dickension vision of a defeated and impoverished United States in mid-twentieth century.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “yokel” or “yokelry,” or other words like it. Have you encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week? If so, consider sharing it here.