Roonerisms Spock

We love silly humor. Puns, wordplay, goofy memes, weird inside jokes... all these things are right up our alley. But the silly game we engage in most frequently together consists of swapping sounds around in pairs of words, particularly the beginning consonant sounds.

Some examples: 

• squeaky pencil becomes peaky squencil 
• chapped lips becomes lapped chips
• blue shorts becomes shue blorts

If one of the words in the pair begins with a vowel, you just move the consonant from the word that has one to the word without one. Example: itchy legs becomes litchy egs.

You get the idea. We come up with these all the time, and occasionally, we drive our family crazy with them (inadvertently, of course). Though we've enjoyed doing this for about as far back as we can remember, the frequency with which we spew out these mixed up pairs of words has increased recently, especially since we found out that there is actually a term for them. They're called spoonerisms.

Some of our all-time favorite spoonerisms we've come up with include:

• buttermilk scones ---> scuttermilk bones
• my phone is buzzing ---> my bone is phuzzing
• digging into my shoulder ---> shigging into my doulder
• jiggling belly ---> biggling jelly

To clarify, the pronunciations of the consonants in question are never changed when they're shifted, even if phonics would dictate otherwise with the new letter combinations.

A word of caution: Thinking before you speak is always wise, and coming up with spoonerisms is no exception. When you're constantly mixing up letters in words, it's inevitable that at some point, you're going to stumble across something that doesn't fall under the PG rating/something that you don't want coming out of your mouth. ;)

Now that we've given you a little insight into just how weird we really are, tell us what sort of silly things you like to do for laughs!

Bonus Post: What I've Learned From NaNoWriMo

Hello, Sarah here.

Katie told you all about Camp NaNoWriMo last week, so for our bonus post I will be giving you some advice on making the most of your NaNo experience. 

Last July was my first experience with Camp NaNo. Despite my good intentions, it did not turn out well. On the first day, my ego was enormous and my energy levels were high. Over the course of the month, all of that leaked out of me gradually like helium out of a balloon. I began to hate my writing, and had I not been typing on a computer, I might have flown into a passion and ripped apart the pages with my teeth, or burned them and danced around them like a maniac. (Luckily, that's a little bit harder to accomplish with Microsoft Word documents.) :)  
The lesson I learned that month was that if you're going to write, you cannot rely on circumstances. Things will not go as planned. Emotions will fluctuate. You might hate what you are writing. That doesn't matter. In the end, how you felt at the time won't be as important as how you dealt with it. Sometimes your best work may come from fatigue, frustration, even depression, as proved by countless artists of all kinds through the ages who turned their hardships into beauty. In retrospect, I realized that.  

With fresh resolve, I decided to try again in November. That was when things got real. This time, my goal wasn't just a measly 10,000 words or so. I wrote 50,000 words that month. Probably more than I usually write in a year. I did fall off track several times, but I was able to write an enormous amount over Thanksgiving break, which I can tell you was a pretty bad time to decide to pick up my slack and write like a fiend. Nonetheless, I finished shortly before midnight on the 30th, barely in time for the deadline. Truth be told, there's never going to be a good time to buckle down and write. You'll always have excuses. Great things can happen when you decide to set aside those excuses and do a thing that most people only daydream about.

This year, with even the tiny bit of experience I have gained, I feel stronger and wiser. I know I still have a lot to learn, which is why I am trying to expand my horizons. My projects this month include short stories, poetry, and possibly a work of nonfiction. In November I plan to attempt a novel again. I have a long way to go to get where I want to be, but the journey, though full of frustrations, may yet prove to be the best part of the experience.

Camp NaNoWriMo: July, 2015

Hey guys, Katie here. I'm posting solo this Friday, but Sarah will be writing the next entry to make up for missing out on this one. :)

It's July, which means it's time for another session of Camp NaNoWriMo! What is NaNoWriMo, you ask?

The main event of NaNoWriMo (which stands for National Novel Writing Month), takes place every November. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in just one month. It's a massive undertaking, but I'm here to tell you from first-hand experience that it can be done! 

The Camp sessions, which occur in the months of April and July, are a little more flexible than the November event. You can set your own word count goal, and you can work on a writing project other than a novel (such as short stories, a script, or your memoir) if you so choose. Technically, you can do these things during November too, as long as you're okay with breaking the rules and thus falling into the "rebel" category.

The challenge presented by NaNoWriMo is a great incentive to move beyond simply thinking about your story idea and actually get a first draft down on paper (or in a word document). If you'd like to know more about NaNoWriMo and and why or how one participates...
Here's a link to the main website: nanowrimo.org
And the camp website: campnanowrimo.org 

For the current Camp session, Sarah and I have each set our goal at 15,000 words. This target requires an average of just 484 words per day, as compared to the 1667 average needed to complete the November goal. We like to reserve that sort of crazy all-out NaNo-ing for the main event.

My own current project (and Sarah's too, I believe) is short stories. I'm planning to write one to three of them a day, depending on the lengths of the entries in question. I chose short stories because they give me a chance to play with the multiple ideas that have been bouncing around in my head rather than being forced to pick just one. Also, I'm getting practice for outlining longer works of fiction by planning shorter ones. I don't naturally tend towards such planning, but I've found that when I don't have at least a basic outline for a novel-length story, I tend to just meander through the plot. Such an approach does not make for interesting reading or a pleasant revision process.

That pretty much sums up my personal writing objectives for this July. Sarah will discuss her own project in our next post, so stay tuned! Happy writing!