The Vocabulary Challenge

Greetings friends.

It's a new month, it's a new challenge.

In August I set myself the challenge of writing every day, and I was pretty happy with some of the stuff I came up with. Since then I have been doing a lot of performance poetry, which has been going really well. And I've rekindled my love for writing. I did attempt to write a novel in November, but I didn't quite pull it off. Still, I will not be deterred.

I wanted to do a challenge that would contribute to future writing adventures. As an actor, writer, and lover of good books, having a good vocabulary is pretty important to me, so I thought I'd do a challenge that would help me to expand mine.

So I present to you a challenge of my own design: The Vocabulary Challenge.

There are a few layers to The Vocabulary Challenge

1. They say the best way to improve your vocabulary is to read. I myself love reading, but don't make enough time for it. So I am going to commit half an hour a day to some reading.

2. I will also commit half an hour a day to playing on vocabulary.com which is a great website where you can test your vocabulary. It's kind of like a game you play in rounds to get points, and it keeps testing you on words until you solidly know them.

3. This is the fun one. I will use my word of the day app on my phone to get a new word, and I will use that word as a stimulus to write a paragraph, which of course has to contain the word. I'll be writing a new paragraph every day, and I'm going to do my best to make them link together so that at the end of the month I will have a short story, which I will post on here. I'm sure it will wind up being very silly in an effort to include all the words I'll be getting from my app!

So, as a starting point, the word of the day today is 'marcescent' - meaning 'withering but not falling off, as a blossom that persists after flowering'

And the paragraph is:

Forty two years of marriage had brought Peter and Judith, among other things, three children who had for a time consumed them completely. Their house had been full of noise and laughter, and their lives full of long working days and family filled evenings that then ended comfortably in each others company. Now their children had flown the nest to have seven more between them, and Peter and Judith had reached their long anticipated retirement. The house was empty, and their lives filled primarily of each other. Faced with the incessant ticking of the clock every day, their previous state comfort seemed to shift towards something they didn't quite have the words for. Soon, Peter and Judith began to realise that their marriage had become marcescent. Hanging by a thread that seemed determined not to break. 

I look forward to writing more :)

Day one of thirty down!