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 for your ordinary Joe, check out the Most Common Surnames in the U.S. using data from the 1990 census.

If you want to put up a simple progress meter on your blog or site, check out Writertopia's page on Writing Meters.

The Great American Novel by . . . Sky Halillee -- get a writing pseudonym that is an anagram of your real name (or anything you type in the box) over at Technologies du Langage here (enter the name or words you want anagramed in the box next to "Tapez sans accents.")

How many characters or words do you type per minute, and how many mistakes do you make? Find out with this online Typing Speed Test (warning, highly addictive.)

A nice collection of world-building links can be found at World Builder Projects.

Dr. Wicked's Write or Die is "a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences." (I tried this in Kamimkaze/Strict moder and deliberately stopped writing to see what would happen. It flashed a few colors at me, then it began erasing what I'd already typed. That is wicked.)

All of the above links were found while rifling through at NaNoWriMo.org's Helpful Orgs and Site forum.