For the Writers on Your Gift List

Yvonne is a master gifter. She has a talent for choosing unique gifts, wrapping them beautifully, and making the giftee feel special.

For someone raised on practical gift-giving, reciprocating creates a lot of pressure. My parents favoured sensible gifts—vacuums, garden hoses, flashlights, can openers, maybe a sweater to liven things up.

That’s what I’m working against when I’m shopping, and Yvonne has learned to steel herself as she peeks into a gift bag and discovers yet another inspiring find from the housewares department. She always rallies, though, and the duller the gift, the more she raves about its utility later. “I still use those measuring cups,” she says, brightly. “Very handy.”

I’ve stepped up my game since the measuring cup debacle a decade ago, but I can’t keep pace with Yvonne, who’s barely hitting her stride.

Recently, with help from husband Dave, she came up with the perfect birthday gift for a writer: framed “word clouds” of our Vivien Leigh Reid series.

I hadn’t heard of word clouds before, but all you have to do is go to wordle.net plug in your text (in this case a manuscript) and voila:

Introducing Vivien Leigh Reid: Daughter of the Diva

Now Starring Vivien Leigh Reid: Diva in Training

The New and Improved Vivien Leigh Reid: Diva in Control

This is a gift with layers.

First, Yvonne is encouraging me to buy a house with a wall upon which to hang my word clouds. It’s a vote of confidence (AKA a kick in the butt) in my long battle against mortgage phobia.

Second, it’s a visual keepsake of a series we loved writing. Seeing “Annika,” “Darling,” “acting,” “film,” “cut,” and “guys” hanging over my desk will take me back into Leigh’s world for awhile and motivate me to recapture that sense of fun.

Finally, the gift is useful in a way Yvonne never intended. These clouds highlight some words we overuse, because the program gives prominence to those that appear most frequently. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see “just,” “maybe,” “anyway,” “already,” “probably,” “always” taking up so much space in my clouds.

Luckily, we’re about to revise the first book in our new Love Inc. series and still have time to seek out and destroy as many of those words as possible. It’s not just a matter of good writing, anymore. I have to think about the clouds overhead.

Not that I’m likely to receive framed word clouds for The Black Sheep or Girl v. Boy from Yvonne for Christmas. A master gifter never repeats herself.