End of September round-up.

I went to another Brian Henry Saturday workshop last weekend, and really had a great time. The topic was ‘writing with style’, and there was a lot of good material on subjects like:

1. What does ‘Show, don’t tell’ really mean?
2. Playful and spectacular first drafts.
3. The tools of showing: Dialog, metaphor, gestures, and actions.
4. Never explain yourself.
5. How to get a reader to relate emotionally to your writing.
6. Don’t waste your words.
7. Revision as gardening – removing weeds and weaklings
8. The building blocks of stories – nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
9. The rule of three in descriptions.

I always come away from a Brian Henry workshop thinking about the craft of writing in different and exciting ways. That alone is worth the time and money it takes to go.

Lesson learned: Don’t catch a cab from Queen street west on a busy Saturday night in the hopes of catching a bus leaving Union Station in fifteen minute’s time. The Tom Lenk show was still worth seeing, though.

I’ve handed out two ‘One Lovely Blog’ awards today, to:

• The (somewhat new) Office of Letters and Light blog, from the creators of National Novel Writing Month.
• Quick Brown Fox, Brian Henry’s writing blog.

And I have a new snazzy widget on the Kelworth Files – a tag cloud. Unfortunately, as of this writing it seems to have eaten my usual links table, and I haven’t yet figured out how to get that back. If you happen to know the WordPress trick to getting that back, please let me know.

Over and out for now.

Award acceptance speech.

First off, once again I’d like to thank Brittany for giving me these two awards!

The Versatile Blogger Award: Link back to the person who gave you the award (already did), share seven things about yourself, pass the award to up to fifteen bloggers who you think deserve it, and contact the people you’ve picked.

One Lovely Blog Award: Accept the award, post it on your blog with a link to the person who gave it to you with a link to them, pass it to up to fifteen other bloggers who are new to you, contact the people you’ve picked.

However, I have to say that I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about passing them along at first… not that I don’t want other bloggers to feel valued and appreciated, but that the whole deal seemed a bit like a benign version of chain letters or something, and I’ve never been a big fan of spreading chain letters.

Having spent a little while mulling over the question, I’ve decided that it’s not really the same thing. For one thing, these awards seem to be pretty honest as to what they’re about, while chain letters always tend to have the ridiculous claims about what has happened to various people around the world when they got the chain, which presumably can’t have been true when the chain started, and couldn’t have been added in later unless someone took liberties with copying the letter exactly as they received it. But never mind that.

Also, these awards don’t seem to be as bully-ish about chain letters about passing them on. And this is the sort of thing that Blogosphere networking is made of, isn’t it? So – I accept the awards, and I will be passing them along, but not just yet. For one thing, I’m not sure who to award yet, so I’ll take my time and hand them out one by one. 😉

And, for my seven things to share as a condition of Versatile Blogger:

1. I love listening to country music.
2. I have many stuffed animal friends.
3. I collect PDAs and other electronic devices.
4. I’ve lost over 100 pounds in the past three and a half years.
5. I recently got a beginner driver’s licence for the second time.
6. I go to the Toronto Buffy/Angel fan meetups when I can.
7. I love Larry Niven’s Known Space/Ringworld books.