It’s going to cost me about $1,200 to fly home this Christmas. My parents really want me to come, so I figured I should go although I really wish it weren’t so expensive to go home. I feel so dang poor.

It’s kinda funny because people tell me that I must visit Korea more often than before because I’m so close. I always tell them, “No. I don’t have money.”

When I was a consultant, I used to go once or twice a year. Now that I’m a starvin’ artist…nada, nothing, no visit despite some of mycousins’ getting married, babies being born. I just can’t afford to go, which makes me uber depressed. And the fact that I have to constantly worry about money and actually consider not going home at all for the holiday — which I did for a while — makes me feel like my life’s going nowhere. It doesn’t help that my townhouse still doesn’t have enough tenants, and I’m bleeding to pay for everything.

Hate being broke.

I thought it’d be fun to try this since I already passed it, but the guy who quizzed me didn’t ask me anything too difficult. If I remember correctly, I had to name the current president. Too easy.

But this test was a bit harder — a little more historical than I expected.

You Passed the US Citizenship Test

Congratulations - you got 10 out of 10 correct!

Could You Pass the US Citizenship Test?

Your Career Type: Artistic

You are expressive, original, and independent. Your talents lie in your artistic abilities: creative writing, drama, crafts, music, or art.

You would make an excellent:

Actor - Art Teacher - Book Editor - Clothes Designer - Comedian - Composer - Dancer - DJ - Graphic Designer - Illustrator - Musician - Sculptor

The worst career options for your are conventional careers, like bank teller or secretary.

What’s Your Ideal Career?

exiguous • \ig-ZIG-yuh-wus\ • adjective
: excessively scanty : inadequate

Example sentence:
The current evidence supporting her hypothesis is exiguous, but Carla is sure she’ll get convincing results from the next round of experiments.

Did you know?
“Exiguous” is so expansive sounding that you might expect it to mean “extensive” instead of “meager.” Even a scanty glimpse at the word’s etymology will disabuse you of that notion, however. “Exiguous” derives from the Latin “exiguus,” which has the same basic meaning as the modern English term. “Exiguus,” in turn, derives from the Latin verb “exigere,” which is variously translated as “to demand,” “to drive out,” or “to weigh or measure.” The idea of weighing or measuring so precisely as to be parsimonious or petty gave “exiguous” its present sense of inadequacy. Just so we aren’t accused of being skimpy with the details, we should also mention that “exigere” is the parent term underlying other English words including “exact” and “exigent.”

From Merriam-Websters Online

pulchritude • \PUHL-kruh-tood\ • noun
: physical comeliness

Example sentence:
“You must not hold my pulchritude against me, for I surely did not ask for it, and even if I had, beauty is neither a crime nor sign of doltishness,” declared Laura.

Did you know?
If John Keats was right when he wrote that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever,” then “pulchritude” should bring bliss for many years to come. That word has already served English handsomely for centuries; it has been used since the 1400s. It’s a descendant of the Latin adjective “pulcher,” which means “beautiful.” “Pulcher” hasn’t exactly been a wellspring of English terms, but it did give us both “pulchritude” and “pulchritudinous,” an adjective meaning “attractive” or “beautiful.” The verb “pulchrify” (a synonym of “beautify”), the noun “pulchritudeness” (same meaning as “pulchritude”), and the adjective “pulchrous” (meaning “fair or beautiful”) are other “pulcher” offspring, but those terms have proved that, in at least some linguistic cases, beauty is fleeting.

From Merriam-Websters Online

Lee Goldberg repoted on his blog that Encyclopedia Britannica sued PublishAmerica. Media Bistro also reported:

Seems that PA has an imprint that they originally called PublishBritannica, which is supposed to be the UK arm of their Vast Empire. But alas, PA didn’t seem to understand the whole concept of trademark infringement, and naturally, the folks at EB aren’t too happy, and have sued for trademark infringement.

I hope this brings PublishAmerica down because I really don’t like the fact that the company pretends to be a legit publisher when in fact it’s just a vanity pub.

25.3%

Total page count: 101

They’re just OK pages. Since Nine’s been massively gutted — several new characters, new scenes, etc. — I’m trying to get everything down before I polish every word until it shines like the finest diamond in the world.

I submitted it to Miss Snark’s crampometer, and it’s crap. But I learned so much from her comments that I don’t even mind that she ripped it apart in public. After all, it’s still really rough.

Last night I felt a bit blue about my writing — you know, the feeling you get when you feel like what you write just isn’t polished enough. Chris said Devil Falls was so much better than Catching Tara, and that he’s confident that Nine will be better than Devil Falls. Perhaps it’s my impatience that’s holding me back.

It was awfully sweet of him to tell me that I could do whatever I wanted, including writing, even if I never sold or made a penny from it and that he’d support me. And that made me even more determined to become a damned good writer.

canker • \KANG-ker\ • verb
1 : to become infested with erosive or spreading sores
*2 : to corrupt the spirit of
3 : to become corrupted

Example sentence:
“It was evident that their hearts were cankered with discontent.” (Samuel Johnson, Rasselas)

Did you know?
“Canker” is commonly known as the name for a type of spreading sore that eats into the tissue—a use that obviously furnished the verb with both its medical and figurative senses. The word ultimately traces back to Latin “cancer,” which could refer to a crab or a malignant tumor. The Greeks had a similar word, “karkinos,” and according to the Ancient Greek physician Galen the tumor got its name from the way the swollen veins surrounding the affected part resembled a crab’s limbs. “Cancer” was adopted into Old English, becoming “canker” in Middle English and eventually shifting in meaning to become a general term for ulcerations. “Cancer” itself was reintroduced to English later, first as a zodiacal word and then as a medical term.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

From Merriam-Websters Online

22.5%

Total Page Count: 90. These are the easy pages. The harder parts are yet to come. Eve just got shot and received some disturbing news. All in all, not too bad.

The first draft is always hard for me to write. Writing good descriptions is always harder than writing the entire first draft. Don’t ask me why or how it is so. It just is. I recently ordered a book on descriptions for that reason.

Tonight, I’m going to read Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer. I figured it’d be good for me to see what the master has to say.

morpheme • \MOR-feem\ • noun
: a word or part of a word that contains no smaller unit of meaning

Example sentence:
The word “unloader” includes the morphemes “un-,” “load,” and “-er.”

Did you know?
Morphemes are the indivisible basic units of language, much like the atoms which physicists once assumed were the indivisible units of matter. English speakers borrowed “morpheme” from French “morphème,” which was itself created from the Greek root “morphē,” meaning “form.” The French borrowed “-ème” from their word “phonème,” which, like English “phoneme,” means “a basic unit of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another.” The French suffix and its English equivalent “-eme” are used to create words that refer to distinctive units of language structure. Words formed from “-eme” include “lexeme” (”a meaningful linguistic unit in the vocabulary of a language”), “grapheme” (”a unit of a writing system”), and “toneme” (”a unit of intonation in a language in which variations in tone distinguish meaning”).

From Merriam-Websters Online