Community

[I suppose she could just become Lorcan's submissive and then you could title the sequel "50 Shades of Red."  I think that's what women are into reading these days... *gag*)

Dado--my previous editor joked about an over/under for how long it took for people to demand sex scenes. I will have to see who had seven months (kidding).

That book is really everywhere. It's funny what taps into people's book-buying cravings. I don't think you could have convinced me when I was slush mistress that a reskinned fanfiction BDSM romance would be the next big thing. I don't think you could have convinced me it would make back it's printing costs, to be honest. And I'll cop to thinking I would have bought Twilight.

In any event, my question is when writing Fantasy literature how much time with a Thesauras is required? I know that Forgotten Realms has its own kind of slang language, but what about historical terms. Do you just know all of the words for the various parts of medieval churches  or do you spend time finding these words? How much time do you spend on word choice? Are these words added in during revision to spice things up or do you find words in other readings that you just MUST include?

Some time. I'm very much of the mind that you don't want to use weird words for the sake of their weirdness.  That said, I'm a stickler for the correct word, and the word the point of view character would know. Farideh, for example, does probably know the names of pieces of armor. Nestrix from The God Catcher probably doesn't.

For things like that, yeah, it's a mix of going looking and picking it up along the way. "Abattoir" I happen to recall learning off the SAT word list, heh. "Pauldron" I had to look for. Wikipedia is enormously helpful for that sort of thing, if you know how to use it. (Obviously, if you're writing a story about an armormaker, you ought to consult more in-depth references than an encyclopedia). Church structure is one part memory (acolyte in a very old Episcopal church/architecture segment of G/T program) and one part searching to corroborate ("Blargh--Is it the nave or the narthex they're standing in?!").  I think if you know and love the words, you dfinitely keep an eye out for places you can use them. And sometimes in looking for theright word, you find new favorites (I found "tarn" in writing Lesser Evils. I bet it reappears at some point).

But again, I think it's critical to use them thoughtfully. I'm reminded of a (this will sound SUPER pompous, but bear with me) lecture I went to by Meave Leakey, shortly after she named the Kenyanthropus platyops specimen. This skull is made up of a zillion little pieces. It's easy to be really skeptical about it's veracity, and she acknowledged that. But she talked about putting it togetehr and how the pieces had to "click" or they weren't counted. If they didn't lie perfectly together, they didn't necessarily belong. You had to be sure you weren't just cobbling together pebbles and calling it a missing link. 

I feel that way about "tarn" and "narthex" and "abattoir" and their ilk.    
 

I know that when I have done NaNoWriMo and run my novel through that thing in MS Word that tells you what grade level you write at I am always very very embarrased!

I had no idea that Word still had that! How do you run it?  (Office 2010 changed SO. MUCH. I used to be a whiz, and I'm STILL relearning how to do the sort of things I knew automatically...)