I’ve just closed a deal with a Brazilian website to write a more-or-less monthly column. Names, topics and URLs will be released around September 1st.

This will be a bilingual column. The Portuguese version of each article will appear on said website, while the English version will appear here (although in a separate topic). It’s a first for me; until now, I’ve written occasional articles and papers in English, and articles in Portuguese for Macmania magazine.

Writing the same article in two languages will be a valuable exercise, I think. My usual modus operandi is to read some reference material, let the information percolate through my subconscious until a few hours before the deadline, and then produce the article in a single (albeit somewhat panicky) sitting. I suppose this won’t work for two languages, and I’m busy reviewing some reference material on writing.

One of my favorite books about writing is Lyn Dupré’s “Bugs in Writing“, and it’s long overdue for rereading. By a coincidence, a post at Ronaldo’s Superfície Reflexiva led me to Crawford Kilian‘s Writing for the Web; Crawford is one of my favorite “alternate history” authors, although it’s been years since I found any of his books. Also coincidentally, he taught a webwriting workshop in São Paulo, Brazil, around the time I was there, and lives in Vancouver, a favorite city I visited a couple of months before that. Anyway, Crawford’s articles are a great resource for writers and I’ll be reading them most carefully…