Road tripping and the loss of words

2 words forward

The road less traveled

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost

I have always looked fondly on the quote above; I've done some weird things in my time and I feel that they were good experiences. In the past few days I managed to do something quite weird again and I was once again rewarded. The weird part about it was that I did it backwards - last year for National Novel Writing Month I wrote an as yet untitled capitalist dystopia. In my novel my protagonist was on the run and he proceeded to skip the state. I knew when I was writing it where he had begun and where he ended but I chose not to name places to give the piece a floating feel. I did, however, this week take on a massive road trip which went the same way as my character's run, that's the backwards part; I wrote first and experienced later. The wonderful thing about this is that I'm in the process of a re-write which will now be coloured by my additional knowledge of the route my character took. We never stop learning about our pieces but it's always better when we still have time to incorporate that knowledge.

1 word back

I lost my words

So my road-trip resulted in me staying with two wonderful people who are now married. Yay! One of these people comes from Europe and her sister and a friend were also down from the home country. This is how I lost my words. I had forgotten how easily I had slipped into a pigeon English while I was overseas and communicating with locals but when I was surrounded by the lovely people from Europe I did it again - I lost my words. My sentences became shorter, my speech slower and my grammar jumbled in the same way that there's was. It was really weird. I've only been back a couple of days and I am still noticing a tendency to avoid abbreviations and I literally had to look for several seconds before I could remember the word abbreviations! I never realised how much I took my language skills for granted, nor how hard it must be for others to slip into my language (although I've been learning another language for a while now). My words will come back but I've learned that I can't take them for granted anymore because I know they can go, too. Now it's time to flex my vocab with some word games, else I'll lose them again!