S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 243

NaNo Ten

Ten Things to Help with NaNoWriMo

Customize your anagrams with Wordsmith.org's Advanced Anagrams generator.

Over at the forums on the NaNoWriMo site I found the quite excellent Big Scary Character Quiz '09, which gives you a long list of questions to answer in character.

Another detailed character worksheet template: The Epiguide.com Fiction Writer's Character Chart.

For those who need to make maps and have GIMP, here's a neat step-by-step tutorial on how to do it.

If you want a common last name ...

Off to Write & Deal

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.)

EndWeek NaNoPost

Since the midweek NaNoPost I've been dealing with things that don't belong in my writing space that I let get into my writing space. Why? Well, I had the best of intentions. It was important. I thought I could sort it out quickly and get back to work. And I didn't, not for two days, and it wrecked me and derailed the decent momentum I had going with the NaNoNovel.

People who are not writers often have very little idea of how much havoc they can create in the writing space. At times it'...

Dimensional Ten

Ten Free RPG Generators I Played with over at Dimensions Game Software

Sight: A thickening fog Sound: A whistle Taste: Bland Touch: Springy Smell: Inviting (The Ambience Generator)

"You hear rattling sounds." (The Automated GM)

The Catacomb Generator

Rhapsodomancy: Divination by using random verses, passages, or words from the works of a great poet. (The Divination Generator)

Fern: Hart's tongue Flower: Gardenia Fungus: Bread mold Herb: Henbane Moss: Peat moss Tree: Cashew Grass: Buf...

Hot Spots

I followed a link over on Gerard's Presurfer blog and found a new and very interesting online generator, described on the site as:

"Feng-GUI simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. This offers designers, advertisers and creatives, a Pre-testing technology that predicts performance of an image, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and pla...

Mid-week NaNoPost

It's a little more than a third of the way toward the NaNoWriMo deadline of November 30th, and if life hasn't interfered in some fashion, I imagine most of you have kept at it. You've probably encountered a few bumps over the last ten days, so it may not feel as exciting or fun as it did when you started out, but you're also learning from it. Success is a lovely thing, but adversity is a better teacher.

Some of the lessons you may have encountered since our last NaNoCheck:

Characters: Your cast...

Winners

It was fun to see the many different types of inspiration you all draw on to create in comments to the Blogging Inspiration giveaway. Photography has been such a strong, new creative force in my life this year that I have to put in a good word for giving a new skill or hobby a try.

We cranked up the magic hat, and the winners of the giveaway are:

Liza, who's never read Artful Blogging (you're in for a treat.)

Carissa, whose very creative good friend and neighbor Laurinda (a lovely name) inspires...

Telling Ten

Ten Things That Appear in Your Novel, and What They Tell Me

Cats > 4: You don't own cats, because if you did you'd know that your heroine will have to run a lint roller over every article of clothing and furniture she owns at least three times a day to keep them as immaculate as you describe them, and spend most of her spare time cleaning up hairballs and emptying litter boxes. Also, her house would not smell like the wildflower meadow you've repeatedly compared it to; it would smell like ca...

Blogging Inspiration

During a quick stop at BAM today I found the latest issue of Artful Blogging magazine, which includes in the buzz section a quote from Yours Truly (is there anything cooler for online art junkie than being quoted in online art magazine? Probably not.) Naturally I bought up all the available copies, so I also have some to give away here.

For your chance to win one of them, in comments to this post name someone or something who inspires you to blog, write, or create in any fashion (or if you'r...

Endweek NaNoPost

We've hit the one-week mark for National Novel Writing Month, which is a good time to stop and take a look at how the work is going. With my normal work schedule I tend to work six days straight and use the seventh to look back, decide if I need to adjust something, and then take care of the thousand small details that I set aside during the writing process.

Some examples from my NaNoNovel: this week I had to coin about thirty words as I needed them to appear in the story; today I'll make sure...