You took the words right out of my … um, book

Here we are, a mere twenty-four hours away from the competition kicking off for the second time. I’ve had the list of words ready to go for a wee while now, but have had all sorts of weird dreams about people trying various nefarious methods of sneaking an advance look – remember how last year I had a dream about the Cookie Monster telling me off? This year my brain seems to have gone to a considerably more grown-up source of angst and has instead tormented me with nightmares about hackers. At least, I think my brain was trying to make them be hackers. My computer screen will suddenly start talking to me, trying to wheedle the words out of me. Not with a scary mask-face on the screen or anything like that, just a voice. A wheedling voice. Quite persistent, and it sometimes breaks into dreams that otherwise don’t seem to have anything to do with the competition. My very own dream-voyaging Mrs Doyle, dropping in just in case I might finally be ready to crack …

Out of a (slightly embarrassing) superstitious dread, I’ve not actually committed the final list of words to my computer yet – I’ve stayed old-school, and have them written down on a piece of paper, ready to type in just before I hit the Go! button on the competition page.

Once again, I’ve had waaaay too much fun coming up with possibilities. Only four books to pillage this time, but still plenty of options. I have, I think, managed to resist the temptation to give everyone words that are too outlandish – Erik Kennedy’s book held plenty of those sorts of temptations – flexuous, anyone? Or post-saurian? – but I have kept my more evil inclinations in check, and tried to only throw in a couple of curve-ball words, and again, nothing as bad as absquatulate.

In alphabetical order, here are some that were on the shortlist but not in the final ten:

anchors
collude
contingent
cotton
cygnets
digitised
embedded
eyebrows
ferry
flaccid
glum
illicit
imbroglio
incomplete
lambent
lurching
mews
partitions
torus
ultrasonic
wobbly

I so wanted to hit you with torus or imbroglio, but figured that doing so may well result in a flashmob with pitchforks assembling outside my house …

… but don’t worry: there’s still plenty of sheer unmitigated evil challenge in the words I’ve held on to.