Post-Nano interview approaching.

Well, I’m still in gliding mode, working on archiving the old Stringing Words, trying to figure out how to apply Holly Lisle’s revision program to a short story, and learning the ropes of the new wordpress.com dashboard upgrades. But there’s something new that I wanted to let you know about.

Rhianna was one of the wrimos that I did a spotlight interview with in late October,  and she’s asked me to return the favor now with a post-Nano interview for her blog. She’s sent me the questions and it looks like a fun interview, but it won’t be scheduled until January.

Still – I wanted my friends and followers to be the first to know!

WordPress 3.4 is a little less than it should be… but they fixed it!

I ran into an unexpected hurdle yesterday as I published my blog post, because the Dashboard page that I use to compose a new post had changed. Usually, there’s the Dashboard menu on the left side of the screen, the textbox where I type my words for you in the middle, and a handy column of control ‘modules’ on the right, where I push the big button to post the entry, preview it, schedule it, and where I enter the tags and categories for the post.

Now, when I write a post on my netbook, the text entry area stretches all the way to the right edge of the screen, and so does every other module. It’s really annoying, as the netbook screen isn’t very high, and so I have to scroll up and down to go from the text to the tags, or anything like that.

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.