Showing posts with label free online resources for writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free online resources for writers. Show all posts

Writer’s Toolbox #5: Must-Have Research Tools Beyond Google and Wikipedia


This is the 300th post on this blog, and the 40th for Ruth Harris!

Ruth graciously agreed to join my blog in August of 2011, right after my out-of-print comic thriller Food of Love was accepted for re-publication by Popcorn Press. I was about to embark on the roller-coaster ride of a lifetime, publishing five novels (with two publishers) as well as contributing to three anthologies...in two and a half months.

I was amazed and honored that a New York Times bestseller and former Big Six editor would want to join my blog. I still am.

Little did I imagine that Ruth would someday want her bestselling fiction to join a book of mine between e-covers. But last November we came out with Chanel and Gatsby, a bi-coastal two-fer bringing together her Manhattan comedy-thriller The Chanel Caper, and my Hollywood comedy-mystery, The Gatsby Game.

I'm still recovering from my publishing marathon that began in mid-2011 and finally ended with the publication of my eighth novel, The Lady of the Lakewood Diner in December 2013. 


There will be more Camilla books coming. But right now I'm trying to deal with all the stuff I neglected over that two and a half year period. Seriously. You do not want to know how many things in my pantry had expiration dates of 2011 or earlier.

I could not have done any of it without Ruth taking over the blog every fourth Sunday. And her advice and wisdom have helped me survive this crazy ride.

Today she's got a fantastic list of resources every writer can use. There are many I'd never thought of. I'm especially intrigued by the name generator for multi-culti or fantasy characters. And the James Bond trivia. Who knows when you're going to need to know which Bond movie featured AbFab's Joanna Lumley, or who was the oldest "Bond girl"? And the BBC's "on this day" historical site looks like a gold mine. 

Thanks, Ruth, for continuing to educate us on this blog every month. We now have nearly 900 subscribers to our blog email, and we hit the 1600 mark with blog followers this week. We would not have the fantastic readers we do without Ruth's expertise, humor and wisdom...Anne


Writer’s Toolbox #5: Reference and Research—the World Beyond Google
by Ruth Harris


Which president came before Theodore Roosevelt?

How do you revive a dying orchid?

How fast can a rhino run?

What does SPECTRE stand for?

In the course of writing a novel, a writer—one who will never indulge in an info dump!—will often need to find the answer to all sorts of oddball questions, some of them basic, others esoteric, still others trivial but nevertheless important.

Google and Wikipedia and YouTube are the basic go-tos but there are many other sites (just about all of them FREE) that will answer your questions and, even better, give you answers to the questions you didn’t even think to ask.

Here is a brief round up of sites I have found indispensable for research including a few that aren’t usually thought of as reference sources.

The New York Times maintains a massive searchable archive containing more than 13 million articles dating from 1851. You can search by author, section, or time periods from past 24 hours, past year or by specific dates.

The Washington Post maintains a searchable archive dating from 2005. (For dates prior to 2005, there is a paid archive search.)

USA Today, New York’s Daily News and the BBC also offer valuable search options.

Time magazine’s archive extends from 1923 to the present and includes the weekly’s covers for a visual look at what made the headlines week by week during most of the 20th Century and all of the 21st.

From hair dos to manicures, grunge to prep: If you need a clue about what your characters are or were wearing or detailed info about their grooming routines, Vogue is the place to go.

Need to jog your memory about books, TV, movies and music? Try Entertainment Weekly.

The dish on celebs? Need inspiration from human-interest stories? What about The Sexiest Man Alive? People is the place to go. And not to forget: James Bond trivia.

Want to ask an expert? Sign up with Quora where you can choose from over 400,000 topics to create a feed of information tuned to your interests. Google Plus has communities devoted to just about any subject you can think of.

Messing with the Mafia? From Omertà to La Cosa Nostra, from Al Capone to John Gotti, the answers are here.

For the raciest in bathing suits or a who’s who and what’s what in the locker room and on the gridiron, the skating rink, the baseball diamond or the tennis court, Sports Illustrated will clue you in. Writing for a younger demo? SI Kids has the deets.

Pinterest, eBay and Etsy are usually not considered research sites but they are gold mines of ideas presented visually and, in the case of eBay and Etsy, items described in detail—a big help when you don’t know what this or that knicknack or collectible is called or when you want to find a popular hobby or off-beat interest for a character.

Need a name for a Catalan or Chinese character? Want a name for a hillbilly, a witch, a rapper? A name with ancient Celtic, Biblical or literary allusions? Try the name generator at Behind the Name

Authors of Regency fiction will find information on law, language, clothing, and the peerage plus links to other relevant sites from Regency author Joanna Waugh.

The Pew Research Center offers a searchable database covering everything from demographic data and scandals to international affairs and global religious beliefs.

Seeking a “fact checker for the internet?” Check out RefDesk.com.

Streetwise slang? Here’s the guide to current lingo: urban dictionary.

Hung up for a movie or TV series quote? This site will probably know.

Consult the Oxford dictionaries in a variety of languages including: British English, American English, German, French, and Spanish. The Oxford biographical dictionary contains bios of almost 60,000 people, English and beyond.

A dictionary on steroids, WordHippo tells you the meaning of a word and also finds synonyms, antonyms, words that rhyme with it, sentences containing it, other words starting or ending with it, its etymology, and much more. Type in what you are looking for, choose the appropriate category and WordHippo will come up with the results, as well as give one-click links to other data for the word.

Setting your story during a particular day in a certain year? Get the scoop on what happened on that day the BBC News OnThisDay site.

There’s a research blog for the history of graphic design at the University of Southern Missisippi.

Contemporary art? Try MOMA in New York City or the Metropolitan Museum. In San Francisco, try the SFMOMA, or MOCA in Los Angeles.

Renaissance art?

African art?

Folk art?

Science? Get information about Mind & Brain, Plants & Animals, Earth & Climate, Space & Time, Matter & Energy, Computers & Math, Fossils & Ruins at ScienceDaily.

Health and medicine? Rely on the experts at the Mayo Clinic.

Still need more? Try the Smithsonian:

The US Army has an extensive, searchable site that covers American wars from the Colonial era to the current War On Terror in the archives of the US Army Center of Military History.

Stuck? Out of ideas? Don’t even know what to look for next? Tell this site what you’re interested in and they will recommend websites/photos/videos: StumbleUpon.

We are living in the information age. Just about anything a writer wants to know or needs to find out is just a few keystrokes away. No more trips to the library. No more scrolling through hard-to-read microfiche. No more searching through heavy tomes to find that one piece of information you're looking for.

Explore beneath the surface to find the pearl of info that will make your book stand out from the crowd: the right research, properly used, can make all the difference.

What about you scriveners? Do you have anything to add to Ruth's list? Are any of you old enough to remember what research used to be like before the Internet?


BOOK OF THE WEEK


The Chanel Caper by Ruth Harris is $2.99 on Amazon US, Amazon UK and Nook | Kobo | iBooks



Here's what USA Today bestseller, Vanessa Kelly says about The Chanel Caper in Love Rocks:

"In an ongoing effort to upmarket her own outdated style and rekindle some romance in her marriage, Blake buys a faux Chanel handbag from a street vendor. This sets off a chain of wild events that includes murder, explosions, counterfeit drug rings, and the pursuit of suspects and warlords from Shanghai to Afghanistan. The Chanel Caper is a romantic comedy, a thriller, and a send-up of the big city lifestyle in the wake of the global financial crisis. All the disparate elements of this very funny story are tethered by the engaging Blake, a smart, sensible, and dryly witty heroine intent on saving her marriage. It’s definitely a romance for the grownups, set against the backdrop of the bright lights of the city that never sleeps."


And for a limited time, you can get The Chanel Caper  together with The Gatsby Game for the same price: only $2.99!  

Hollywood and Manhattan: it's Bi-Coastal Comedy!

Available at





OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

Win a critique of your novel from a literary star and Cambridge professor. Winners will get full critique valued at $800. Contest sponsored by the Writers’ Village Foundation, a not-for-profit UK organization established to help new authors. The top eight submissions will win a session of personal feedback from the award judge, novelist Michelle Spring, a Royal Literary Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Entry fee is $19 and the deadline is 31st March.

GLIMMER TRAIN FAMILY MATTERS CONTEST $1500 prize, plus publication in Glimmer Train Stories, plus 20 copies. $15 ENTRY FEE. They're looking for stories about families of all configurations. It's fine to draw on real experiences, but the work must read like fiction. Maximum word count: 12,000. Any shorter lengths are welcome. Deadline: March 31.

Dark Continents Publishing's Guns and Romances anthology. They're looking for previously unpublished short fiction from 3500-9000 words. Any genre as long as there's a tough protagonist, weapons, and... at least one reference to music. Sounds interesting. Payment rate is a one-off of $20 per story plus a percentage of the ebook royalties. Publication estimated in late-2014. More info on the website. Closing date for submissions is February 28.

Glamour Magazine "My Real Life Story" Essay Contest NO ENTRY FEE. $5000 prize, plus possible publication in Glamour. Creative nonfiction. Must be factual and appropriate for a Glamour audience. 2500-3500 words. Deadline February 1st.

Dog Lovers! AMERICAN KENNEL CLUB FICTION WRITING CONTEST NO ENTRY FEE. Submit one short story, maximum 2,000 words. Entries can be on any subject, but must feature a dog. (But it can't talk) Prizes $500, $240, $100. Deadline January 31.

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The Big "O" for Writers—Organization: The Writer's Toolbox #3


This is Ruth Harris's third installment in her Writer's Toolbox series. You can read Writer's Toolbox #2 here and Writers Toolbox #1 here. 

Today she's talking about tools for organizing your research and ideas: very timely for me this week. 

I've been working on and off for months on researching my next Camilla mystery, which takes Camilla back to the English Midlands (where she may or may not find out whether Peter Sherwood survived that yacht disaster).


I had the bright idea of creating a subplot involving Richard III, since his remains were recently discovered under a parking lot a few miles from the Midlands town I call Swynsby-on-Trent. (And who better to meet up with the ghost of the last Plantagenet king than Camilla's best friend, Plantagenet Smith?) 

And ever since, I've been lost down a rabbit hole of research. 

Do you have any idea how many books have been written on the subject of Richard III? Then there are the archives of the Richard III Society, the Society of Friends of King Richard III, the Richard III Foundation, Inc.—and myriad social media pages and websites. I could spend a lifetime reading Ricardian lore and never write my book at all. 

There is, indeed such a thing as Too Much Information. So I'm going to get to work with some of these tools (just downloaded Evernote!) Now I'll see if it will help me tame the wild ideas in my head into a well-behaved plot. ...Anne

Writer’s Toolbox #3: Organize Up. Clutter Down. A cyber-Container Store for writers with lots of FREE stuff.

by Ruth Harris


Ideas come helter-skelter. Plot points arrive unbidden and in no coherent order. Characters can be stubborn and do what they what—not what the author wants. Dialog arrives in disjointed bits and pieces. The “perfect” sassy/ominous/devastating come-back might take a week (or more!) to marinate and then create.

Research all by itself can be chaotic mess. Take my novel ZURI for example:

  • Rhino ophthalmology? Check.
  • Safety protocols at zoos? Yep.
  • Endangered species? Basic.
  • Poachers and poaching? Can’t write the book without.
  • Illicit wildlife trading stats? Need-to-know.
  • How elephants communicate? But of course.
  • Career paths for veterinarians? Certainly.
  • Good goats and bad goats? Definitely.
  • What, exactly, does an expert in animal communication do? Gotta find out for sure.

In order to write Zuri there was all this plus plenty more but no way was I the only writer slogging through an Everest of info. Writers of historicals, techno thrillers, fantasy and multi-book series must also keep track of voluminous amounts of data and information.

In all books timelines need to be pinned down and adhered to. Can’t have a snowy Christmas scene in which a character in shorts and a t-shirt admires the blooming geraniums on the terrace.

Conflicts must escalate in pulse-pounding ways which means scenes must fall in just the right sequence. Can’t have a violent shootout in a gleaming office tower come before what seems a laid-off employee’s boozed-up threat against the boss s/he hates.

Characters need to be believable and consistent. Can’t have a blond, blue-eyed Alpha hero turn into the shy, poetic type. At least not without a damn good reason.

The overwhelmed writer must find a way to pummel, massage and mold the whole mess into a book that will delight readers.

It’s a huge, often frustrating task but here are some handy or even indispensable helpers, some I’ve mentioned before, others new (at least to me), lots of them FREE or available at modest cost.

Evernote, a FREE download, is well known and widely used. Evernote’s slogan is "Remember Everything", and this powerful app does exactly that. Evernote can save images, web pages, videos, audio files (great for phone interviews) and comes with a handy reminder function. Evernote will take dictation, you can email research to and from, the web clipper does its job perfectly and it’s hard to imagine a writer whose life won’t be made easier—and more organized!—thanks to Evernote.

Here are some research how-tos and tips from author and blogger Alexandra Samuel to help you get even more from Evernote. Thanks to Alexandra, I found out that notebooks can be set offline so you can access your information even when you’re away from an internet connection.

Scrivener, a powerful writing tool which comes in both Mac and PC versions, is an effortless organizer. My Mom used to say “a place for everything and everything in its place” and Keith Blount, Scrivener’s creator, must have been listening.

Scrivener provides places for your manuscript, your research including web links, images, audio files and videos. There are easily accessible cork board and outline functions and, because of Scrivener’s “binder” concept, moving scenes around is quick and easy. There is a generous trial and, if you decide Scrivener is for you, the purchase price is $45.

At The Organized Writer, Annie Neugebauer makes the excellent point that organization is just a framework for creativity. Hover your cursor over the Organized Writer on this page and you will find a useful drop down list of templates for everything from a writer’s bio to plot sheets, agent queries and character charts. All FREE.

A post there by Stacey Crew has a number of suggestions for coping with the messy business of writing. One I particularly like is using your smart phone to dictate ideas that occur to you when you’re away from your desk doing errands or walking in the park. Your phone will convert your words to text so you can email yourself your brilliant ideas and save having to retype them.

At Adventures in YA Publishing, Martina Boone and co. offer detailed instructions plus pix about how to create a plot board. The plot board (called a storyboard when used in pre-production on movies and tv) uses ordinary office supplies and allows a writer to visualize his or her book scene by scene or in overview.

Alexandra Sokoloff, screenwriter and teacher, uses an index card method for keep track of plot and story structure. She goes into detail about the three-act structure, the how-tos of her system and explains how her screenwriting techniques also apply to novels. Alexandra even includes a part-and-page breakdown for fiction writers.

Bestselling novelist Diane Chamberlain also uses the index card method and shows via pix the difference between the neat and organized final book and the chaotic and messy WIP stage.

Cindy R. Wilson at the Writers Alley talks about needing a direction (as opposed to a plot) when she starts to write. Cindy uses a combination of folders, notebooks and lists to keep herself organized and lays out the details here.

Author of medieval romance, Blythe Gifford, uses a spreadsheet to rein in the chaos. With her trusty Excel spreadsheet, Blythe has developed a way to keep track of everything from timelines to backstory, from a character’s first kiss to big picture stuff like war, peace, pestilence, famine and crashing meteors.

At Harlequin, Shelly Jump tells how she developed a simple way to keep track of myriad details that comprise a writer's life. She uses inexpensive stationery store items like colored folders, archive boxes, notebooks and highlighters to help tame the onslaught.

The staff writers at Open Education Database have pulled together 150 FREE online resources covering everything from help with research and statistics to basics like grammar, spelling and definitions. This invaluable list also includes assistance with business and legal matters, organizational tools, genre guides ranging from technical writing to fantasy, word counters and professional organizations.

We may never achieve the perfect big O (not that one; get your mind out of the gutter!), but these hints and tips will definitely help you contain the clutter.
***

How about you, scriveners? Do you find it tough to assemble all the data in your head into a coherent story? Do you use index cards or storyboards? How about Evernote or Scrivener? Or do you just jot stuff down in separate .docs and throw it in a big old Word folder the way Anne does? 



Book of the Week
Available at Amazon US. Amazon UK, NOOK



The kindness of humans.

The intelligence of animals.

A book that will move you like no other.



ZURI's triggering event is the near-extinction of Africa's black rhino. Rhino horn is more valuable than gold and the illicit global trade in wild animals is third only to the smuggling of drugs and weapons. (Contains no sex or cursing and is appropriate for older YA readers as well as adults.)


Opportunity Alerts

The Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award from the Mid-American Review. $10 entry fee for a story up to 6000 words. First Prize: $1,000 and publication. Four Finalists: Notation, possible publication. You may submit online or snail mail. Details at website. Deadline is November 1, 2013.

J.F. POWER PRIZE FOR SHORT FICTION NO ENTRY FEE. The winner will receive $500. The winning story will be announced in February, 2014 and published in Dappled Things, along with nine honorable mentions. The word limit is 8,000 words. Deadline is November 29, 2013.

MYSTERY AUTHORS! The Poisoned Pen Press, one of the most prestigious small presses, is open for submissions for one month. They open for submissions twice yearly, once during the month of October, and once during the spring. During October, they will accept submissions for regular publication. During the spring submissions period they open for the Discover Mystery first book contest. Please note their entire submissions process is electronic via the online submissions manager, Submittable. Mailed or e-mailed submissions will not be read. They will be accepting regular submissions during the period between October 1 and October 31.

The Lascaux Prize for Short Fiction: Stories may be previously published or unpublished. Length up to 10,000 words. Entry fee is $5, and authors may enter more than once.The editors will select a winner and nineteen additional finalists. The winner will receive $500 and publication in The Lascaux Review. Both winner and finalists will earn the privilege of displaying a virtual medallion on blogs and websites. Deadline December 31, 2013.


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