A fun break

I thought I’d share a fun break I discovered the other day.  I’ve been doing this for several days now and it seems at least for me to be a lot of fun and good brain exercise.  I’ll include an example at the end of this post.

My wife loves word seek puzzle books, me not so much.  Sometimes I’ll see an open book she’s doing and mentally find the unmarked words just to kill a few minutes.  That’s too easy, though, and somehow recognizing that got me to playing with the words in a different way.

The first time was just to see if I could do it.  After that it was kind of like an addiction…I’m not as into to doing this as my wife is to doing word seek puzzles, but now I don’t even try to find the words she’s not yet found.  Instead…

I start with the first word in the list and add a couple words before it and after it as seems needed then add in the next word…and the next…and the next…and the next…until I have all the words in the list done, in order, and have crafted a sentence.

As can be seen in the example at the end of this post, the sentences are long, really long, which is what happens when you’re given 20 or 30 or more words and “told” to make a sentence out of them.  Some are convoluted sentences, some are perhaps not geographically correct, for example, but they are all sentences that make sense.

Right now I only have two rules I follow:

1. I take the words in order, from first to last, top to bottom and left to right.
2. I do not modify the words in any way, they must be used as they are printed on the page.
3. I write one single sentence.

That second rule, however, does not mean that I can’t apply whatever definition I want if it has more than one definition.  In the example below, the word seek category is “The Great Chesapeake”.  From that and the other words it’s kind of obvious that they’re referring to sand bars and the like.  While I could use it that way, I preferred to use it as the bars the sailors go into.  That just gave my sentence a little more rhythm in that part.

As for Rule 3 that’s how I’m doing it at the moment.  I could, I suppose, break it up into several sentences, but this just seems to be harder to keep cohesive as a single sentence.  If I really wanted to polish it up and develop it more as a proper piece of writing, breaking it up would definitely be the thing to do.  But for the fun and games of this, one sentence is the rule.

Now for the example.  Like I said in Rule 1 above, I start with the first listed word.  For me that’s the left-most column of listed words, first word at the top.  I work down that column then over to the top of the next column to the right, down that, and so on to the last word of the last column.  Same way every time.  It’d be too easy to hop around and pick the words in the order I want, so this makes me think ahead about the words coming up.

Without further ado, here’s the example.  Like I said, the word seek category was “The Great Chesapeake”.  The words listed for the word seek are capitalized while my added words are normal text.

On the shores of BALTIMORE by the sailor’s BARS is a BRIDGE from the CITY to the COAST by the CREEK of the CROAKER where CROPS grow in the shadow of the DREDGE doomed by the ECOLOGY freaks because of EELS and rare ELEMENTS in the ENVIRONS of the FIELD where the GEESE rest and HARDHEAD patriots wrote HISTORY in MARYLAND at MENHADEN by the SALTY marsh where the SCHOONER Brendan gives SHELTER among SHIPS run aground the SHORE and so stuck in SILT at SITES where the SWAN with TRANQUIL gaze watches the TRAWL set by WATERMEN near WILDLIFE scenting the WINDS near the WOODS where my YACHT was built.

As you can see, following my rules the listed words are naturally also going to be in alphabetical order in the sentence.  I said earlier it was a long, convoluted sentence.  🙂  In this case, a long, convoluted, descriptive sentence.  😀

There was another one, “Tools of Trade” that was just a list of various tools.  At first I was stuck on the tools concept and using tools.  Once I got my mind outside the toolbox I started this thing about the AUGER dancing with the CHISEL around the spindly legs of the CALIPER while the HACKSAW and the HAMMER, which doesn’t know JACK, argued over the JIGSAW pieces….

You get the idea.

Go try it.