UNDERCOVER and The Book of Words

Ever since I published UNDERCOVER, whose language-craving heroine is encouraged by her English teacher to keep a journal full of words, I've been hearing stories about others' books of words, bulletin boards of words, scraps-of-loose-paper-in-file-folders collections of words. Even my son came home one day not long ago saying, In English they're asking us for our own book of words. He groaned (he didn't love studying the SAT vocab lists either). But in the end he came up with something so cool and defining that I had to sneak away and look up some of his words myself.

You could ask what for and why keep a book of words, since there's always a dictionary nearby, since any word you could conceivably want is already in some book somewhere. Since you can't really own a word, can't say, This word is mine.

Me? I keep a book of words because my brain is rather small, because it doesn't remember what I want it to remember, needs jogging, much of the time. You, for example, might carry the meanings of "despumate" and "thigmotropic" around in your head. I have to go back, look them up, remember why I liked them to begin with, think about how I might use them somewhere. (I just did.) You might be reading along and know "vatic," no problem. I had to look it up and after I did, I rather liked it, and now it's in my book of words so that someday (maybe) I'll return to it and wrap it up inside some poem.