Mood: irritated
Topic: Writing
I'm working this evening, or at least trying to. My little one, whose bedtime is 8PM, didn't settle and go to sleep until 10PM (even under threat of not going to Papaw's house tomorrow). At 10:30, I finally settled in for some serious BIC time, only to run into a problem with tact.
You see, there is no gentle way to talk about a penis and balls. I don't want to talk about them sexually - the first few paragraphs of this work is about schoolchildren studying a type of magic called "making", where the focus object for the magic is body art, aka tattoos. Their teacher is literally covered in "maker's marks", so he's showing the class as a "this is what you could achieve" lesson. We have both boys and girls in the class, so he must be modest; how do you say he has a cloth over his you-know-what and *not* sound like a seventh grader? Argh.
The thesaurus was no help, either. I'm trying to *avoid* sounding like a seventh grader, not achieve it. All the words they supply for "genitals" make it sound like a bunch of little boys giggling in the corner because Jane said a dirty word. Sheesh.
So, here I am, stuck in paragraph two. I think I'll add a placeholder and hope someone at www.absolutewrite.com/forums can come up with something creative and useful.
Word count for 09/20/05: 753
Posted by wvwritergirl
at 12:01 AM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, 21 September 2005 12:13 AM EDT