I wrote a story about blowing into fans because everyone blows into fans to hear her voice echo. Finished story. Tesfa, unprompted, ran up to our fan and yelled into it.

Listen to me she shouted.

I sound funny!

Expand your horizons by reading a new book.

So says my fortune from the buffet Chinese place we went to in Fredericton. Well, I read plenty of books. My horizons should stretch out now in all directions as far as the eyes can see, not blocked by the dairy farm and the fir trees in the line of my vision outside my house.

Writing a story about summer as the end of the snow melts and the lake from melted snow in our yard recedes. But after the last winter, I’m not convinced that summer any longer exists. It’s a dream. Warmth and sun.

Fixed the screen door anyway, just in case.

Isn’t that the question that gets lobbed out to writers at public speaking events? I remember having a book about being a writer (which my maternal grandparents gave to me in an uncharacteristic show of support for talents. To give you an idea of my grandparents, a few weeks ago my maternal grandmother said that my five year old daughter had a good, slim figure, so, yeah, um, okay) and that was pretty much the entire book Where do writers get their ideas.

So in case you’ve ever wondered where I get my ideas, here is an example. I read a book about a lifeboat. I am now writing a story about …. wait for it … a lifeboat.

There you go. You can all marvel at the intricacies of the meghan mind. Pretty much how I read a book about faeries and then decided to write a story about faeries.

In any case, my lifeboat story will likely be short and have fewer characters. I got confused with the number of characters in the lifeboat story I just read. Also, my story will probably not be that good. But it’s the thought that counts, as long as the thought doesn’t involve too much outright, blatant theft from the book I just finished.

A few months ago I read about the Portuguese word saudade. Wikipedia tells you the word means a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return.

That’s pretty awesome, I thought to myself. Why don’t more people know that word?

Except now that in the last ten or so books I’ve read, saudade has been in five or so of them. Clearly I missed the message that saudade was the it word I was supposed to be using.

Then in Kristen Lavrandsdatter, which didn’t have the word saudade in it, although who knows, perhaps the newer translation does, I learned the word rime, which living in the horrible northern part of the world where I am confident that winter will never end this year and we will be frozen forever, is strange that I didn’t learn this word until now. Wikipedia tells you the word means a white ice that forms when the water droplets in fog freeze to the outer surfaces of objects. It is often seen on trees atop mountains and ridges in winter, when low-hanging clouds cause freezing fog. This fog freezes to the windward (wind-facing) side of tree branches, buildings, or any other solid objects, usually with high wind velocities and air temperatures between −2 and −8 °C (28.4 and 17.6 °F). Another useful word, which, since January, has appeared in four books I’ve read. So I guess I’m expanding my vocabulary.

Then it’s starting to become one of those Reader’s Digest Improve Your Wordpower or whatever that thing is called. I have a friend, for whom English is her third language, but due to spending a lot of time with a dictionary, knows a lot of more obscure or archaic words, which she often puts into conversation to the befuddlement of native English speakers, and I think of her as I am reading The Mask Game, which is not particularly appealing to most people, including myself, and it seems the same thing. The non-English author has an amazing vocabulary, possibly due to dictionary diving, and I look up a word every few pages or so. Some are scientific words, some are possibly made up because they aren’t in my kobo dictionary, some may be transliterated directly from Ukrainian or Russian. This book is long and has aliens in it and ghosts and an inability to pick a verb tense, which I am going to say is not on purpose but due to less-than-stellar copy-editing. I didn’t think this book would be this long, and the claim that it was all done with automatic writing, which Wikipedia tells you is an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without physically writing. The words are claimed to arise from a subconscious, spiritual or supernatural source, which seems grossly unfair in that if I could outsource my writing to the spirit world, I would too (and I’m writing a story about faeries right now, so any faeries are welcome to apply), but instead, I’m stuck using my own hands and my own ideas to make stories that don’t use as advanced a vocabulary and are unfinished because of Tesfa snow days and the fact that I write slowly and the fact that I spend most of my time thinking about things that are not useful for writing.

So all the things I don’t know.