Monday, November 15, 2010

And Other Cool Tricks...

Photography by Lucy Boynton
I love to do useless things on my computer...I usually subconsciously couch it under the whole, "Research" title to make myself feel less guilty about messing around when I should be writing.

One of the fun things I discovered today was Wordle.  Its a word cloud generator where you paste in text and it creates an artistic representation of the most common words in that excerpt.  I put in what I've written so far in my novel, Bayou Blue and this is what I got...Jake and Riley.


Cool Beans, huh?

Well, it's not only fun, but it gives me a visual picture of words I use a lot of. If I have mostly, "saids" and "shrugged", I need to take another look at my dialogue.


A really great site for getting into that writing groove is 8tracks. Free hand-crafted internet radio mixes designed around your task at hand. From jazz to techno, users pick and organize tracks to share. One of the offerings, I See You Are Writing a Paper, is a great blend to get your fingers flying over those keys.

Finally, Writing Fix is a website that creates custom prompts to help you launch your writing. From right-brained to left-brained, there's a story starter made just for you.

I know most of you are in the throes of NaNo and my hat is off to you who rose to the challenge.  Hope to catch your work in future blogfests!

Until next time...Go Write!