If you are interested in writing for children I highly recommend Barbara Seuling’s book, How to Write a Children’s Book and Get It Published. The book defines the five essential steps to getting published and writing for different age groups along with improving your writing skills, submitting manuscripts, and on becoming a part of a writing community. I read this book many moons ago and I found it to be one of the best I read on writing for children. It gave me a clear idea of what children’s storytelling is really about and the things not to do. I even had one of my stories critiqued by Barbara. It was well worth the cost.

The one thing that sticks in my mind to this day is Barbara’s warning to avoid writing moral message stories that are founded on a didactic approach to storytelling. It probably sticks in my mind because I didn’t know the definition of didactic and I believe that all stories have a message of some kind. Apparently new writers commit this storytelling crime on a regular bases. This little tidbit changed my whole approach to storytelling.

Didactic: Inclined to teach or moralize excessively; moralistic. This was the Word of the Day at dictionary.com on September 28, 2000.

Barbara is an accomplished writer, teacher, and speaker. You can read about her and her upcoming writers workshop here.

Wow, it’s been almost two months since I posted here. I don’t seem to have a good concept of time these days. I did finally get that new (used) computer working. Installed a new video card, more memory, a modem, a CD-RW internal drive, new connectors and I bought a new harddrive. I tried to install the new harddrive but after many hours of total frustration, I gave up! It seems that my bios does not recognize a harddrive over 10GBs. I did find some instructions for work-arounds but none of them worked. The only other thing I can do is update the bios.

Apparently, updating the bios is a big deal. If you screw it up, you have no computer. They call it “Flashing the Bios”, now that’s a scary term in my opinion. One could flash it out of existence with a single DOS command! *ugh*

The good news is that the computer is working like a charm with the old harddrive. I may add another harddrive but I’m done messing with computer parts and DOS commands for now. I did fix-up my old computer and gave it to a co-worker. Unfortunately, she knows nothing about computers or how to use one. I’m going to have to spend some quality time showing her the basics.

I am now in the beginning stages of creating a website for a friend. While doing some research for her, I made a decision to start my own website hosting company so that I can host her site. It’s something I wanted to do about a year ago but didn’t think I had the skills needed to host sites for other people. Hosting a friends sites allows me to experiment and find out what I can do. I’m very excited. I may even decide to host blogs for a small fee and then create a directory that categorizes them by a human, or humans, rather than a program. The blog directories I’ve found do a poor job of categorization.

The question is - what am I going to do with this blog? The answer is - I don’t know. I know that I want to change the design and that I would like to keep the writing information and add more writing content. But I also think I want to expand its focus a bit. I’m hoping I will update more often if I allow my focus to become wild and expansive. After all, this blog is called Wild Mind!

I’ll be back.