Fun With Worms!

And no, that's not a typo. For fans of the much missed, and comic marvel, Ronnie Barker, he had a character to was often getting his 'worms muddled'.

Today's post is a recommendation for a fun game involving words. If anyone gets 'Writing Magazine' you may have already discovered it, as this is the only place I've seen an advert for it, and even that was only once I believe. It seems to be a well kept secret.

The game is called 'Le Cardo', and it's basically a sort of scrabble with words. You have a pack of cards, each of which has a short word on it, such as 'under', 'back', 'drive', etc. Each player takes seven cards and you have to make two word phrases, in a grid, with those cards. You can go as many times as you can make a word, until you run out of options and it's then the next person's go. You then pick up as many cards as you need from the deck to get back up to your seven. Each card has a number on it, and you total up the score for each word you made and keep a tally. Whoever has the highest score at the end, when the cards are gone, wins.

I don't know if I've explained it very well, but I really do recommend it. We've had a lovely time playing it and it helps stretch the old brain, but not too hard, which is what we like (well, I do anyway!).

 

At the moment, I've only seen it at Amazon but some independents may stock it. Here's a link in case you fancy having a go yourself.

It's a great way to while away the odd hour, and being the size of a pack of cards, easy to take with you on holiday for those rainy moments! And all the while, exercising your brain and helping you keep thinking of worms!

Research On Hold and Reading

Well, the project I was working on has (hopefully) temporarily been put on hold as I wait for the contract to come through. It's later than expected and I'm wary of putting a whole lot of time into something, only to find that when it comes to the crunch, there's no deal.

I've found myself in this situation once before, and I really don't want to end up there again. Hopefully things will come together very soon and I can get back on with the project. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about e-books. I read an interesting post from Carol recently, which mentioned the fact that you can download a sample of the book onto your kindle, or kobo or whatever to get a taste. I've done this myself in the past, although I still haven't got around to reading it yet! I'd rather forgotten about this useful aspect of e-books.

Sometimes in a bookshop you can read a bit, and decided immediately whether it's grabbing you or not but having the luxury of reading a sample in the comfort of your own home (or wherever you are travelling with your trusty reader!) does come in useful. You can get more of a feel for the book when you've got a bigger sample to try. The other benefit is that you can try authors you might not normally gravitate towards in a book shop. For free! And of course, should you find that you can't wait to read on, with a few buttons pressed, the whole book is sat there waiting for you.

I have to admit the ease with which e-books can be purchased is both useful and possibly dangerous. Impulse buying has a free reign in these situations I find!

As mentioned, I do have an e-reader but I'm not a great user of it - at the moment. I love the feel of a 'real' book in my hands. I love going to library and coming out with a little pile of goodies to start working through and I would absolutely hate to see the demise of the real book, the bookshop or libraries. Any loss of these would be tragic. But I can see the advantages and it's useful to be reminded of some of them from time to time.

Researching Tip

I'm in the process of researching for a project and I've been trying to think of the best way - for me - to collate all the info. Whilst reading up, I might come across something that should go in one chapter, and then immediately something else that should go in a different one. I had thought about one of those tabbed Project Notebook type things that places like Smiths sell, but I didn't really want to be handwriting all my notes.

So I've come up with a solution that I hope is going to work for me. For the moment, I'm just bunging various sentences, copies of report findings, and all the other goodies in a Word document, with a small gap between each item. When I'm done with each source, I will then print out the document in draft, and go through it, and slicing it into the separate bits of info. Then, with the aid of a trusty glue stick, I'll paste these onto some loose leaf papers I have and put them into a binder which is already separated into the chapter headings.

Well, that's the idea anyway. I'll report back later to let you know how (or if!) it's working.

Any thoughts?

Happy writing!