NEW links

 

Links for Writers

My Favorite Page!

September 7, 2005, Eugene, Oregon...Sunset falls...our hero dons his black mask and prepares to fly out into the darkening city, a ghost of twilight set against the violet sky...ack! What time is it? Now you know!

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneDay.html

(In case you need to know right now, it's 7:37 pm.)

This also works, of course, for your fictional town of Passion, Oregon, if you pretend it's near Eugene.

A page useful to those of us who must admit a secret quickening of the blood around a certain type of darkly handsome, perhaps rather pale stranger.

Want to know where he's from? (Or at least, who his real-life neighbors are? Or is that real-death neighbors?)

Find A Grave

http://www.findagrave.com/index.html

How far is it exactly from Los Angeles to Athens, Greece?

http://www.mapcrow.info/

And if you want to know how long it takes to fly from one place to another, look it up at the departing airport, such as LAX, under "flight schedules." It will tell you the duration of the flight and the arrival time at the destination, usually in local time, so be sure to watch out for time zones!

Name your characters!

Or at least argue with them when they claim that they have names like Gertrude and Aloisius. Really, who's in charge here? (Hint: it's not you.)

A general site:

http://www.babynamesworld.com/advanced_search.html

Search by origin or fun category:

http://www.20000-names.com/index.htm

A good site for variants of names:

http://www.thinkbabynames.com/

Last names and their meanings:

http://www.thinkbabynames.com/

http://www.last-names.net/

These are really useful sites in case you feel like injuring someone and want to know what happens next. Someone fictional, of course!

http://www.aofoundation.org/portal/wps/portal/

http://www.emedicine.com/

Should you decide to bless a character with a medical condition or perhaps just sneak him or her a good dose of poison, these are some really good places to research:

http://www.inchem.org/

http://www.rxlist.com/script/main/hp.asp

And here's one for the less legal kind of drug.

This is a site where people record their experiences with the different drugs.

http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp_front.shtml

How do you...

http://www.howstuffworks.com/

http://www.madsci.org/

And don't forget YouTube! It's great for things like swing dance steps.

http://www.youtube.com/

Crime and cops:

http://www.policewriter.com/

For fashion of the not-so-distant past (but long enough ago that you don't remember):

http://www.fashion-era.com/fashion_after1980.htm

http://www.tias.com/stores/vpv/

http://vintagepatterns.tripod.com/id2.html

And one a bit older:

http://www.milieux.com/costume/index.html

Good for paranormal writers:

http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/aliens.html

http://www.pantheon.org/

Coast to Coast: a good place for plot ideas! And giggles.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2006/05/

And some catch-all sites.

http://www.realmsofresearch.com/research/contents.htm

http://www.refdesk.com/

http://www.memorywiki.org/en/MemoryArchive

A hard copy resource:

This is a wonderful series for writers that has been extremely useful to me. The Howdunit Series:

http://www.amazon.com/howdunit-series/lm/2IS50WU1FMSLU or check your library, of course.

Romance Writers of America:

https://www.rwanational.org/eweb/StartPage.aspx

RWA Fantasy, Futuristic, & Paranormal Chapter:

http://www.romance-ffp.com/index.htm

My Favorite Non-Writing Site

Recycle the revolution!

http://www.freecycle.org

New Links!

Look what I found!

Say you mention that the Ivory Ball is the first Saturday in April. Say you also mention that it's 1995.

You might want to know what day that is:

http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/

(It's April 2, by the way)

Tips from an unpub--what works for me.

• Write in chronological order instead of story order--that is, backstory first. Saves mess later.
• In a paranormal romance, there are two sources of tension and excitement: the romance and the paranormal. Yeah, sounds obvious, I know, but it's easy to lose track of what's really appealing to readers when you're in the middle of writing a huge book. The paranormal element might cause tension because it's a secret or because it's dangerous or because it's just hard for a normal person to deal with, or whatever. Your plot should grow from these two main forces. The rest is (artfully done) glue.
• Show, don't tell! Give your readers some credit for connecting the dots.
• Read your book out loud to some poor captive soul. You will end up cutting a bunch of nonsense, getting on-the-spot feedback (such as "huh?"), plus realizing you wrote "she said" five times in a row. Ouch!
• After you've written it, put it away for a while and go blissfully entertain other characters. Come back to the book when you don't have it memorized anymore.
• DO NOT GIVE UP. Make the agents/editors/publishers say "No." Don't say it to yourself. That's actually good life advice, except if you plan to make the police tell you "No."