Check out the new look

Written Words has moved from the worthy Blogger platform to Wordpress. Along with that, as you will see, it sports a new, cleaner look and new functionality. I like the white space, the categories for blog posts and the ability to search through the blog. I hope you do, too.

Come over, take a look and leave a comment telling me what you think.

Why make the change?

The most important difference now is, the Written Words blog is an integral part of my revamped Written Word Communications Company website, writtenword.ca. Since I started the blog years ago—in 2006!—I have wanted to integrate into the website. But mostly because i wasn't willing to invest the time into figuring out how, I never did—until now.

A couple of months ago, I began an effort to update the writtenword.ca website. I quickly found that cheap or free web layout programs usually are not that easy to use, and worse, are not reliable. Freeway Express, for example, is free, but it inexplicably changed the names of all my image files. If all I wanted to do were to create a nice website that sat on my desktop computer, it was great. But when it came to uploading it to my domain host, well … I’ll tell you about that in a future post, where I review the software in detail.

Internet dependence

I'm writing this post on vacation, and I realize that I need more than an hour of Internet access per day.

If I want to get anything concrete done, that is. 

And it's not my fault. The things I want to do on the Internet each day, if I could just do them quickly, would probably take me about 20 minutes.

Except for writing blog posts, of course. 

My situation

I'm on the Mayan Riviera for a 10-day all-inclusive vacation with my lovely wife, Roxanne (I know, boo-hoo), where I get to access the free WiFi network for at most an hour a day. I could have 24/7 access, but that costs more money. (My grandparents were Scottish.) So, I've been working with an hour's daily  access.

It's been very relaxing and refreshing. I've been mostly disconnected from the real world down here, and I'm only sporadically informed about the Montreal-New York series, the Ukrainian election, Russian invasions, celebrity deaths, mass shootings (blind guess about that, but I'm probably right), and other depressing news.

"You're supposed to be on a beach vacation, not spending all your time looking at the Internet" my lovely wife says when I grumble. So I have another (price included) drink and splash into the Caribbean, or talk to the iguanas. They never complain about limited WiFi, so I guess I shouldn't, either.

And I've learned something valuable: the Internet tortures me whenever I use it, but I do it so much I haven't noticed until I've disconnected.

How the Internet tortures me:

1. Making me wait. Has anyone ever added up all the time we waste waiting for the computer or the network or whatever to stop spinning the ball or the hourglass and update the work we've just done? To make that connection, already, to save the file? When your access is limited to an hour in total—working and uploading as well as waiting for the app to launch and the various servers to shake hands—you really notice all those delays.

2. Limited apps. I love my iPad, but when it's all I have for blogging, email, web surfing and social media, I really notice the differences, the limitations of the mobile apps compared to the full desktop versions. 

Take Facebook, for example. I cannot select a portion of a Facebook post, copy it and paste it into Twitter on the iPad. I don't know if it's because of the touch-screen interface or some combination of settings, but that's completely intuitive on the desktop version.

Hootsuite's iPad app doesn't have bulk tweet scheduling, which is the main reason I use the service in the first place.

In the desktop version of Pages, my clumsy fingers find it almost impossible to change the indents on paragraphs.

The iPad version of Blogger, which I am using to write this very post, doesn't allow me to indent whole paragraphs, or have bulleted and numbered paragraph formats. It also does not appear to have a Schedule feature, like in the full version.

I know, first world problems. But they slow down what I try to do, so I cannot accomplish in an hour what should take twenty minutes: 

- check the email and delete all the junk. On the iPad, I tend to delete news releases and social media updates, leaving them to the desktop when I have more time to devote to them. The iPad only has so much memory, and I try to restrict it to stuff I need immediately.

- check Twitter for mentions

- check the blog status for number of pageviews yesterday and comments, and publish the real ones (as opposed to spam)

- check Google+ and Facebook for important updates and announcements

- upload a new daily spreadsheet to Hootsuite.

If everything went quickly, if apps and networks responded without delay, I am sure that I could accomplish all that in 20 minutes. Okay, maybe half an hour.

Granted, it will take me 15 to 20 minutes to create a .csv file for uploading to Hootsuite. I need more time to respond to the important emails, write some of my own, and of course write blog posts like this.

But being restricted to an hour a day? It's just frustrating.

All that to say, I'll be back in full form, rested, recharged and full of new ideas in a matter of days. Till then, faithful readers, keep on questioning.

Telling Tale Tales — lots of them

Kathy Lynn Hall on Style interviews

Writing style can vary widely over time and around the world. Like many readers, I can almost hear a particular “voice” when I read a British author as compared to an American writer. And who could argue that Dickens and other 19th-century authors had a style distinct from today’s prevailing style?

It seems to me that commercial fiction publishers are imposing a style. Can you distinguish Dan Brown’s style from Tom Clancy’s? EL James from J. Sterling’s?

It’s so refreshing to read an author like Kathy Lynn Hall, whose writing style is fearlessly her own. You probably already know her for Red Mojo Mama and its sequel, Red is an Attitude!, as well as The Great Twitter Adventure and other books, as well.

Kathy, how would you describe your own writing style?

Folksy — it took me a long time to find my “voice” and once I did I realized that it’s very earthy and one-on-one. I think I would have been one of those people sitting around the pickle barrel, telling tall tales in the old days.

Are there any authors whose style you admire? Do you try to emulate them?

I absolutely love Agatha Christie and Jodi Picoult, but can’t begin to write like either one of them. The only thing I think I can imitate is the way a story is woven. I often think of this as a pinball machine — anyone remember those? — when the ball starts down the chute and you’re madly trying to use the flippers to keep it pinging off all the little thingies. You keep trying to go back to the high pointers, sometimes failing, but sometimes you hit it big and everything lights up. That’s what a writer lives for.

Are there authors whose writing style you dislike?

No particular authors, but if a story is bereft of heart, I’m really not interested and quickly lose interest. If it’s all action and no character-building or interactions, I just stop reading it.


How important is your writing style to you? Are you happy with your style, or are there aspects of it you try to change during rewriting or editing?

I have grown to really like my style. I’ll never be the Great American Novelist and that’s okay with me. If I can make a reader love my characters and care about them, then I’m happy. The one thing I have to watch out for is my tendency to be too concise and leave out description. I started out as a screenwriter and that’s ALL dialog, so I have to curb those tendencies.

How can readers identify your writing style? Are there particular words or kinds of words that you tend to favour? Sentence structures? Or is it more in the story, the pacing or the characters?

It’s definitely the characters and what they say and do to each other. I could have written Castaway — the film — because my character would have invented Wilson, too.

Do you think your genre imposes certain restrictions on writing style?

Absolutely — I think any genre does that. My “Red” novels are romantic suspense, which demands that there be enough romance, but not so much that it becomes a romance novel, and enough action to keep you hopping. The current novel I’m working on is a political thriller and I’m stepping outside my comfort zone a bit to insert enough action.

Do you think your audience responds to your writing style, consciously or unconsciously?

With any author, I think the reader responds unconsciously at first, but eventually how you are writing rises to the surface and they begin to recognize what they like about the way you write. Or maybe what they don’t like.

How important do you think writing style is to an author's commercial success?

It’s everything. Almost, anyway. Style can overcome a lot. Sure, you must have a great story and characters, but if your style is clumsy or tough to read, you’ve lost the reader before they even get that far.

Thanks for the opportunity to do this interview, Scott. I enjoyed it.

And thank you, Kathy, for your insight.


Kathy Lynn Hall is author of the novels Red Mojo Mama, Red is an Attitude and The Great Twitter Adventure, the short-story collection Her Heart, the autobiographical collection of musings entitled Tell Them You’re Fabulous and the social media guidebook Blog & Tweet — How to Make a Splash Online.

She’s also a prolific blogger, maintaining seven (!) blogs simultaneously, while participating in others’ blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more. And somehow, she manages to do a whack of charity work and respond to pesky interviewers.

Check out her blogs:

• Fabulous For Less
• Live Young Die Old
• Red Mojo Mama Musings
• In the Writing Groove
• Sacramentoandbey...
• Kat's Dream World
• Life Lessons Volume One

What do you think about Kathy's comments about writing style? Leave a comment.