Learning while I Write

 It is interesting how much I learn while writing one of my books.  With the Molly Pink books, it was mostly about crochet and yarn. With the Yarn Retreat series, I have looked into information about the area and what goes on at retreats.  With the Writer for Hire series, it is all about words.  Since words are Veronica's business, she thinks a lot about them which means I have to.

Veronica is the leader of a writing group that meets at her house and all her students know that she doesn't like cliches and thinks that it is better to think of another way to say the same thing.  What's funny is that I find myself starting to use cliches.  The thing is that they get the meaning across in a few words. Because of all this thought about cliches, I began to wonder where different ones came from.  Things like two to tango seem pretty obvious, but what about reading between the lines. That it turns out came from cryptography and codes the would have the message embedded in every second line.  

Then came idioms.which are a group of words that have an accepted meaning that isn't deductible from the individual words like raining cats and dogs.  Sometimes idioms are also cliches.

In the book I'm working on, MAKING IT WRITE, one of the characters is forever  looking up everything on his computer.  Veronica likes the smell of gin and he does a little research on his laptop and finds out why.  Gin is made from juniper berries along with other botanicals, though the juniper berries are what are responsible for the main aroma.  The name gin is a derivative of the French word for gin.

It's fun learning along with my characters.