Mandatory words

Content

When a mandatory word has already been used in the manuscript, mark the word with strike-through. Under it, add the exact chapter and scene where the word was used.

Panopticon This is exactly the nature of the Central Algorithm. The Complex was panoptic, but not punitive.

Exulansis The tendency to give up trying to speak about an experience because others cannot relate to it, whether through envy, pity, or simple foreignness. The experience then drifts away from the rest of one's story until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering without a place to land. From Latin exulans, exile or wanderer, and connected to the Wandering Albatross, Diomedea exulans. Pronounced "ek-suh-lan-sis."

Wildred The haunting solitude of extremely remote places: a forest clearing, a windswept snowfield, a rest area in the middle of nowhere. It gives the sense of having intruded on a silence that had nothing to do with you, as if the place itself were withholding welcome.

Elsewise The poignant strangeness of other people's homes: their smell, arrangement, private rituals, framed photos, small objects, and domestic details that reveal a life organized according to a logic entirely different from one's own.

Idlewild The grateful feeling of being stranded somewhere where nothing useful can be done: an airport gate, train sleeper car, or backseat on a long road trip. It briefly removes the burden of infinite choice and lets the mind drift freely.

Ne'er-Be-Gone A person who no longer knows where their home is, or was, or when they left it. Their emotional compass swings from place to place, pulling them everywhere and nowhere at once.

Kenopsia The eerie feeling of places left behind: rooms, schools, offices, fairgrounds, or homes that once held life but now feel hyper-empty, charged by the conspicuous absence of the people, routines, noises, and memories that used to inhabit them. It is the sensation that a place has not merely become empty, but has been abandoned by the story that once made it meaningful.

Ecumenopolis A planetwide city: the hypothetical concept of an entire world transformed into a single continuous urban system. From Ancient Greek oikoumene, "the inhabited world," and polis, "city." It is a common science-fiction setting and has also appeared in theoretical urban planning and futurist speculation.