PULL UP OUR SOCKS?

That’s what Heidi urged us to do when our blogging was going down the tubes. I looked up the expression and found this:

Socks didn’t always have an elastic band around the top. Our great-grandparents used to wear garters to keep them up. In days gone by, schoolboys in shorts could regularly be seen with socks drooping around their ankles and were told to smarten themselves by pulling their socks up.

Poor kids. Try rolling a hoop down the street with lengths of knitted tubing fluttering around your feet. A definite dog attractor. There are other sock expressions found and explained on the internet, but I won’t go into them here. Some are fun and suitable for a writer to utilize.

So, here we are, pulling up our socks.

Heidi went at it with a vengeance (see two posts ago), with her medieval manuscripts post, and Karen followed with her short story woes. I feel for her; I’m in the same boat, struggling with word counts that don’t allow for character expansion or descriptions out the wazoo. Wazoo is a fascinating word. Thank goodness that it has gone beyond its original meaning and is now acceptable in family settings and good clean writing. At least I think it has. If I use it, if I’ve even heard its new meaning, it generally indicates it’s been in usage for ages. Like, pull up your socks.

My short story woes are slightly different than Karen’s. I enjoy ripping the clothes off my overdressed stories till they are clad only in the basics. Just a tad more than a birthday suit, the suit in which your story was dressed when it first occurred to you. No one wants to see that. Still, I need to have a complete story within the confines of competition requirements, one that sounds right for the word count, neither sparse or wordy, There’s a great word in Yiddish; ungapatchka. It means too much. I love it. Don’t bother looking it up; it’s not there. It’s a word that just is. I don’t think there’s an opposite, an antonym, or maybe I haven’t heard it yet.

I added a program to my computer (drum roll here), that’s been helping me with my writing. It’s called Grammarly. There is no part of my brain that can deal with grammar and punctuation. This program spots all my errors and, with my permission, will correct them for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to memorize Strunk and White’s Elements of Style to no avail. This program is the cat’s pajamas. Probably Dr. Denton’s with the socks attached.

So now I’m whizzing through my short stories like mad, not because I have this program but because all the competitions I want to enter are due at the end of this month. Grammarly is a real blessing to those who have a phobia to usage.

I’ve gotten four stories out already (these were pre-written stories; nobody is that good), whereas I (my critique mates, actually) would still be struggling with the grammar in the first one or two. I’ve spared them unnecessary anguish when their own troubles already besiege them.

You see how well I’ve pulled my socks up, Heidi?