Block Revision Kelworth-style update

Hey there, friends and followers. I haven’t actually dived into Block Revision yet, but the preparations are almost done – I went to Walmart yesterday to buy peanuts, a little beef jerky to try, and Scotch Tape, and I’ve nearly finished getting the Focus Outline and worksheets ready to print – Office does surprisingly well at copying Excel worksheets into MSWord tables, and I like the way that turns out.

So hopefully I’ll actually start the Block Revision by tomorrow evening – I’ll let you know how it goes.

My flash fiction for the first Campaign Challenge

I think that I’ll reverse the usual pattern that I’ve seen before, and give you my story first, and then the challenge rules:

The door swung open, and a beautiful girl hurried inside, her finger held up to her lips and her eyes asking me an urgent question. For a second I was confused, and then I lifted the far section of the sales counter to let her come back behind. She crouched into the storage cubby under the cash register, and I was just starting to get naughty thoughts about the whole situation when a hand reached out to stop the door from quite closing.

The man who came in next had periwinkle blue eyes and his feet didn’t seem to quite touch the ground. “Excuse me, sir, did you see a…”

“She went out the side door, didn’t even close it behind her,” I blurted out, realizing that I could use the fact that I’d left the door open for the summer breeze to the girl’s advantage. “Why are you looking for her?”

His eyes rested on me for a moment, but he didn’t answer, and took a moment to close the front door behind him, then stepped calmly over to the side exit. I busied myself with an order form to avoid giving the girl away. The door swung shut.

 

First Campaigner challenge:

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. Begin the story with the words, “The door swung open” These four words will be included in the word count.

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), use the same beginning words and end with the words: “the door swung shut.” (also included in the word count)

For those who want an even greater challenge, make your story 200 words EXACTLY!

(And just for the record, I achieved the highest level of the challenge – at least, according to MS Word’s wordcount.)

Roughdraft, the word processor.

Well, I’ve talked about writing gadgets on this blog, but never really thought to blog about writing software until today. (This changed when I was suddenly inspired by a Storywonk podcast.) So, I’ll tell you about my favorite word processor for writing new material.

Now, when I’m actually writing, the key for me has to be speed. I’ve never really found something like MS Word or Works to be good for keeping up with me when I’m coming up with new stuff, and on windows, OpenOffice writer didn’t seem to cut it either. (I find OpenOffice.org much speedier on the linux eeePC, which is good, since abiWord sucks and they’re apparently the only two options in Ubuntu town if you want to work with RTF files. But anyway…)

The thing is, I don’t want to write in a program that’s bloated down with a lot of features that I’m not going to use for writing. Each feature takes up RAM, it occupies space on the menu or the toolbar, and it’s a potential distraction. Of course, once the initial writing is done and I’m doing revision or formatting a manuscript, something like MS word is clearly the better choice.

For a long time, I was writing my stuff in WordPad and then copying to a more feature-rich word processor when I needed to – like to check on my word count. This became very frustrating once I was participating in National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriYe and began to live or die by my word count.