Words Rah Loves: Sippi

I was supposed to meet with The Three last week for a fun, deep exploration of setting (one of my subheads: Setting is a tyrant). Unfortunately, the day before the meeting the Poet Accountant, R and I had to head to Georgia for a funeral.

Funerals are full of setting, of course. The same family has run this particular funeral home in North Georgia since 1935, and our cousin-uncle accepted an outpouring of love and grief from what seemed like the entire town in the same rooms that held visitations years before for the Poet Accountant's grandmother and then his grandfather.

As we waited, we got reacquainted with all those cousins and second cousins and first cousins, and we tried to figure out which kids belonged to who (no one really knows, not even their parents), and we knew we would be back there again, someday, on another sad day. In a setting that hadn't changed at all and yet had.

Hang with me. I know that's heavy.

If you're going to be driven from your ancestral lands by
greedy landowners, this ain't a bad place to end up, yeah?

Funerals are settings, but they're also journeys. The road trip we took to get to that carpet town in Georgia took us over a mountain in Virginia and down I-81 South, a land of truckers thundering over gray and green hills the Scottish settlers thought looked like home. They named their towns Glasgow, Buchanan, Fincastle.

The Virginia part of that trip is one Rah makes every year, but past that we ventured into the foreign land of East Tennessee. If you leave I-81 and let the Great Smoky Mountains absorb you (watch out for the great sucking sound of tourist traps like Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg), you'll find yourself in one kind of heaven. But we were on the interstate—81 to 40 to 75—looking for clean, non-dodgy places to pee and eat (no truck stop Subways!), driving through the ugliest parts of Knoxville and Chattanooga.

And then we saw it: a sign for the Pellissippi State Community College.

I don't know if that gives you whiplash, but it did me. There's the Mississippi, of course, but it had never occurred to me that issippi might be some kind of a suffix. Luckily, the Poet Accountant dwells in a world of technology, so he was able to look it up on his evil smartphone while I scanned the horizon hopefully, desperately for a rest area.

She is a grand river river, ain't she?

Turns out that sippi means flowing water (maybe in Chippewa). You're probably not surprised to learn that the missi of Mississippi means large. So we have large flowing water. Which means that when we say the Mississippi River, we're really saying the large river river. Like when we call the Rio Grande the Rio Grande River. (Don't do that.)

(We could go down this path all day, but I'll try to restrain myself. Except I can't help mentioning that missi is related to michi, as in Michigan, and massa, as in Massachusetts. All done now. Really.)

I know you're dying to know if there are other sippi names in America. There's at least one: Poy Sippi in Wisconsin, named after the river that flows into Lake Poygan. Clearly, we need more.

Why does Rah love sippi? Well, besides the fact that it's so happy sounding (sippi! sippi!) and a delightful suffix discovery any day (I know; I'm a word geek), it was in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, I think writers worry about coincidence in their stories, like when Jane Eyre oh-so conveniently runs into her cousins. But coincidence is part of our lives and runs like ley lines through us, connecting what seems unconnected.

Like: Right after I saw the word Pellissippi for the first time and wondered about its origins, it started turning up everywhere because President Obama gave a speech at Pellissippi State Community College about his plan for free community college. You know how when you're dating some guy and suddenly you start to see his type of car all over town? It was like that. (Don't worry, Poet Accountant, that hasn't happened recently.)

Like: There is no river named Pellissippi anymore. These days we call it the Clinch River, which is where a bunch of the traditional musicians the Poet Accountant digs hang out (or did, when they were alive).

Like: We were going to a funeral when I saw the word Pellissippi, and it reminded me of the summer I spent with my cousin and how—because we were kids, I guess—we spent a crazy amount of time spelling Mississippi backward. (It really is fun; has a great rhythm. You should try it.) When we went to her funeral last summer (she was way too young), we crossed the Mississippi in a plane.

For Michelle and Gwen: ippi-ssi-ssi-m.

The Further Four: Where and When (Or: Location, Location, Location)

The Further Four
(or some Gemini astronauts; you decide)

It's been a while since I've hung out with The Three and The Further Four, but it's the new year, and we're getting back into the swing of things. Today, The Further Four and I hit the highlights of setting; next week, The Three and I will go deeper into the role setting can play in your writing.

So remember talking about the Five Ws? They're all buds, but Where and When are best friends. Together, we call them setting, and in general, each story has two kinds: the setting of the story overall and the setting of each scene.

The Big Picture: The Setting of a Story

The big picture of setting is the where and when of a story’s world: the U.S. in 2015 or during WWII, Medieval France or Planet Taco at the height of the Rah Empire (it was a great time). The big picture setting includes the culture and government of the society your characters are in but also more intimate things like the language they speak and the rivers and mountains near them. Building styles (a suburban strip shopping center versus a corner grocery) and geographic location (the South, the Midwest, Siberia) are also important parts of place.

Parts of a Place

Dude, I'm pretty sure I don't want to live in this world.
I don't care how many suns there are
or how benevolent the government is.

• Buildings, roads, natural formations
• Culture/festivals
• Weather/climate
• Language
• Laws/form of government
• History
• Geographic location
• Urban/rural

Big picture setting also includes time. When it's summer where Cranky Rah lives, she might be out on the river in her canoe. In the fall, she'll be out eating a taco at the truly awesome Folk Festival. In the winter, she mostly hibernates in her cave, like any good bat. So time of year affects your characters, but what year it is does, too. Popular music changes (Elvis, Duran Duran, One Direction); slang changes (fly, awesome, totes); technology changes (three words: rotary dial phone).

Parts of a Time

Joan Baez totes digs that groovy
Bobby Dylan, you get me, dames?

• Year and season
• Time of day/night
• Music, clothing, slang
• Famous people/events/politics
• Technology
• Food
• Gender roles
• Mood (hopeful, violent, exciting)

The Small Picture: The Setting of a Scene

Everything your characters do has a where and when, and both affect how they behave. A fight over the last taco happens differently depending on if the characters are alone or in a crowd. (For the record, Cranky Rah gets the last taco.) Here are a few pieces of the where and when of a scene:

• Space: indoors or outdoors, big or small, crowded or empty, loud or quiet
• Who else is there: not just main characters but people in the background
• What else is going on: eating a meal, running from the law, confronting a werewolf
• Movement: characters staying in one place or characters moving
• Weather: threatened by a tornado, trapped in a haunted house by a thunderstorm
• Familiarity: a place the characters know and feel good in or one that’s strange, unnerving

Setting It Up: Creating Setting

You want specifics? Carne asada with
refrieds on the side. Cumin and garlic!
The way the tortilla dissolves into blissful corn
grit on the tongue! The zing of lime and
silk of avocado! Oh, yeah.

Be specific. If flowers are part of your setting, be specific: Are they roses or daffodils or that really smelly flower that only blooms once every several years?

Use your senses. We tend to focus on sight, but place and time have smell, sound, touch and taste, too. Don’t forget to use the others when setting your scene.

Keep it under control. A quick way to slow a story down is by throwing paragraphs of setting at the reader. Weave your descriptions into the action. It takes practice but gets easier the more you do it.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Terrible Titles Blog Hop

My most awesome writing friend Cool J (also known as Elle Blair) just told me about a thing called the Terrible Titles Blog Hop. This is the idea: Scroll through a work in progress (WIP), and let your cursor land randomly. Wherever it lands becomes a Terrible Title. Repeat about eight times.


Here are mine, from a WIP with the working title Starwood Vine:

• Shoveling Cereal Into His Mouth
• I Climb Trees
• [Redacted because this blog is family-friendly, and those randomly selected words were so not]
• The Poison Apple
• Threw My Pregnant Sister Under the Bus
• Fluffing Away Into the Wind
• Eating Into the Black
• Cut You a Check On Monday

And a bonus one because of the redaction: Watch Them All Be Dead. Probably my personal favorite.

Words Rah Loves: Edible Dormouse

I wanted to start this blog post with the quote You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home. I know it by Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13 (I've mentioned my obsession with the Space Race, right?). It turns out it was also said by some dude named Og Mandino, author of The Greatest Salesman in the World.

I've never heard of Og, though The Greatest Salesman has sold 50 million copies and been translated into 25 languages. I don't know if Og stole the line from Lovell or vice versa or if they both borrowed it from a third party, but the actor Matt McConaughey has said The Greatest Salesman is the reason he became an actor, so I'm not going to be too harsh on old Og.

(The name Og, in case you were wondering, wasn't given to him in honor of his great caveman ancestors; it's short for Augustine.)

So you really never know where research might take you. Like to the edible dormouse.

I've been doing a lot of research that takes me into the realm of botany and zoology. There's a type of animal dormancy called torpor, kind of a hibernation-lite. Hummingbirds, for instance, go into torpor on cold nights to preserve energy. Their body temperature plummets, and their heart rate can drop from 1,500 beats per minute to 50 beats per minute.

It was in Discover Wildlife's article How to Tell Torpor from Hibernation that I read this:

Common dormice hibernate at ground level in woven nests partly covered by leaf litter or moss or in hollow trees. Edible dormice have been recorded under tree roots and beneath floorboards in outbuildings.

Edible what?

Everyone knows the Dormouse from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—who, incidentally, keeps falling asleep during the tea party. I had no idea there were multiple kinds of dormice, much less some poor thing called edible.

So here's the deal on the edible dormouse:

Aren't I so cute?
Oh, wait! Is that a Roman?!

The largest of all dormice (five to seven inches long), the edible dormouse is also known as the fat dormouse and, less harshly, as the squirrel-tailed dormouse. Though it's a terrible threat to the woodlands and orchards of England, it is a native of western Europe, which is where the Romans got a hold of it and gave it its gastronomic name.

How'd I lose my nose? Well, I love a
crunchy little dormouse, I do, but
they're viscous.

The Romans used to catch these furry little rodents in the fall when they were fat. They kept them in pits and fed them chestnuts, acorns and walnuts, and then when it was time to roast them up, the Romans would stuff them with pork and pine nuts or glaze them with honey. Apparently, whole roasted dormice made a tasty snack.The Etruscans agreed.

You might think the edible dormouse is pretty happy, now that those pesky Romans are all gone and they have free rein in the UK, but, alas. They are still hunted and eaten in Slovenia, and it was there that the British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal got the dormice for his 2009 Christmas feast. Chef Bluementhal called his dormouse on a stick, dipped in white chocolate, a "dormouse lollipop," and it was not a hit. Even Bluementhal admitted, "It went down a bit like a lead balloon," which is a lovely double entendre.

What does this have to do with etymology? Not a thing. I just love the phrase edible dormouse.