S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 236

Coining by Association

Jeroen Kessels' Word Generator creates artificial random words in your choice of seven languages. The helpful thing about this particular generator is that it produces words that look and even sound real (at least in English, Spanish and French; I'm assuming it does the same in the other available languages.)

It also gives you sixty words at once, which gives provides a nice selection to choose from versus the one-word generators out there. While I was playing with it, I started making a li...

Story Divorce Ten

Ten Things that Indicate You and Your Story Should Part Ways

Backstory Shortages: A description of all your characters' backstories can fit comfortably on a Post-It note, and you're okay with that.

Character Massacre: By page fifty you find yourself killing off the entire cast, and you're not writing a zombie novel.

Crit Partner Pass: You refuse to show any pages of your story to your crit partner, unless you really hate him/her, in which case you dump all the pages on them.

Flame Fodder: when yo...

Seriously Neat

I am off writing again, but so that your stop here was not wasted, some neat links to check out:

True humor in advertisement is a rare thing; brilliant storytelling is almost always non-existent. Find an ad that has both and a run time of only 1:28, and well, you have Nolan's Cheddar* (animal lovers will likely be furious about halfway through, but keep watching, it's not what you assume. You folks at work, try to watch it at home or when you can listen to the background music.)

SF writers oft...

In the Trades

The February issue of The Writer was a bit of a wash this month. Several articles in the issue focused on self-publishing, but I didn't feel they presented the reality and downsides as well as they might have. It's nice to hear about the handful of authors who make it big via self-publication, but hard stats on how many don't make it, how few writers earn back their investment, and exactly how time-consuming and aggravating the self-pub process can be would have provided more balance.

On the p...

Wordling Poetry

I've discovered a cool new trick to do with Wordle, my favorite online word cloud generator, that can help with titles, coined words and other phrases you might need for a story.

On Wordle's Create Page, paste in the text box a poem that you like and/or that somehow relates to your story and click go. In the cloud screen, set up the layout to be horizontal with rounder edges, and choose a non-fancy font option like the one I have below (Scheherazade.)

Here's what e.e. cummings's poem ...

Got Cover

Here's the cover art for the final StarDoc novel, Dream Called Time , book ten (to see a large version, click on the image.)



Made it to the last book of the series without a single unsightly cover in the bunch, too:



My only regret is that the publisher decided to change the cover design toward the end of the series to "update" it, as the last three covers don't mesh well with the first seven. But I also realize cover art styles and tastes change over the years and cohesion is not a top priority...

Blog Blocked

If writer's block wasn't bad enough, I'm seeing a lot of excuse posts out there in NetPubland that could all be titled "Why I'm Not Blogging." Makes me think a good portion of the online writing community has developed a raging case of blog block.

It's understandable. Anyone who is now trying to keep up with the demands of the social media promo trend has got to be exhausted; I honestly don't know how you all do it. If I had to spend that much time twitting and facebooking and scribbling I wo...

Winners

It looks like a lot of you are finding some great reads out there to jumpstart 2010 -- thanks for the many recommendations you made for The Secret of Everything giveaway.

Tonight we put the magic hat to work, and the winners are:

Nicole

Sherry

Melissa, whose comment began with The Host by Stephenie Meyer. I liked it a lot better than Twilight because it was written more for adults and it was very character based.

Birgitte Necessary

Keita Haruka, who started 2010 with my free e-book Ravelin

Winners...

Worldly Ten

Ten Things About Worldbuilding

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Want to see a worldbuilder at work? Stop by Are you a God?, Nils Jeppe's art, writing and worldbuilding blog.

AutoREALM is "a Free GNU mapping software (a "cartographer") that can design maps of castles, cities, dungeons and more. AutoREALM is generally used by Role-playing Game practicants who enjoy doing their own maps. But it co...

Off to Stomp

Create a sticky note online for your blog at Wigflip.com's sticky note generator, Superstickies (link swiped from Gerard over at The Generator Blog.)