marginalia

 

Wherein we find some rather unusual wordage and present them to you along with their meanings… just so, you know, you don’t have to.

Crapulous – when you realise you’ve made yourself unwell from eating or drinking too much.

Groak – to silently stare at someone while they eat, hoping they will offer you some of their grub.

Velleity – a wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action.

Hornswoggle – to scam or con.

Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.

Tittynope – a small quantity of something left over.

Wyrd - the resonant ways that fate and destiny interact with our own individual choices.

Elflock – hair that is tangled, as though matted by elves.

Kakorrhaphiophobia – the fear of failure.

Coddiwomple – a journey undertaken without a specific destination in mind, purely for the pleasure of the journey itself.

 

Each week we shall take it upon ourselves to offer you an aggregation of our ten current favourite things, in no particular order. Sorry.

  • ‘All The Way’ by Ramones.
  • Globe Soup, a terrific online community for writers.
  • The couple of minutes immediately after a thunderstorm.
  • White Horse by Erika T Worth.
  • Walking all the way into town with my wonderful wife, even when it’s raining and we’re not really dressed for it.
  • The Black Echo by Michael Connelly.
  • Rum. Oh, and Pimm’s.
  • ‘You’re Wondering Now’ by Snuff.
  • Castiel’s ‘I’ll just…wait here, then’, from ‘Supernatural’ - season 5, episode 4.
  • Wild Wolf Publishing 😊

 

Over the course of the last few weeks I’ve seen the question ‘how old is too old to be a writer?’ – or a variation thereof – appearing in several different places. The usual ‘advice’ is something along the lines of: life experience makes you better, gives you more to draw upon, any age is fine so long as you have the talent, you can never be too old, etc etc. Which is all quite reasonable, I’d agree with all of that, but then I’m no longer in the first flush of youth myself. Still, writing is not an Olympic event. There’s no running or jumping or anything overly physical like that. It's not the muscles in your legs and arms, it's the one in your skull that counts.

So, anyway, for this spot of inspiration I thought it might give someone the push they need, should they find themselves thinking they’re ‘too old’ to write, if we had a look at some authors who got their own start later in life.

Toni Morrison was 40 when her first book, The Bluest Eye, was published, and of course she went on to win the Pulitzer Prize eighteen years later for her book Beloved and, aged 63, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mark Twain was 41 when his first book, The Innocents Abroad, was published, immediately becoming a bestseller. He went on to write twenty-eight books, including, as you know, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Henry Miller’s first book, Tropic of Cancer in Paris, was published in France in 1934, when he was 44, going on to be banned until 1961.

JRR Tolkien was 45 when he published The Hobbit in 1937, and you don’t need me to tell you that he went on to follow it up with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, selling over 150 million books worldwide.

Annie Proulx was 57 when her first novel, Postcards, won the Faulkner Award, while she also won the Pulitzer Prize and the US National Book Award for Fiction with her second, The Shipping Cards. You may also be familiar with her Brokeback Mountain, later adapted into a movie.

Finally, our champion this time around is Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist of Angela’s Ashes, published when he was merely 66.

So, next time you begin to worry that you are past your prime, that the brow of the hill has slipped behind you, remember these fine authors. It’s never too late to do whatever it is you want to do. Unless, of course, you were born post-1995 and you want to start a career as a professional footballer, or perchance a choreographer.