NaNoStuff Ten

Ten Things for the NaNoWriMo'ers

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Artificial Planet is "a virtual world for artificial intelligence. The environment has water, land, suns, moons, and atmosphere. Plants, animals, fish, and insects can be added to create a dynamic ecosystem. Clouds, rain, wind, lightning, rivers, and icebergs naturally arise from the sun and other influences. You can explore your planet from outer space, by walking around, by tracking creatures, or by controlling a robot that interacts with objects. Artificial Planet is an OpenSource project built with GLScene" (OS: Windows 98/2000/XP)

AutoRealm is "a Free GNU mapping software (a "cartographer") that can design maps of castles, cities, dungeons and more. AutoREALM is generally used by Role-playing Game practicants who enjoy doing their own maps. But it could fits the needs of other people. If you are a Role-Playing gamer or else, you are cordially invited to join the AutoREALM community: fellows gathered around a free hobbyist map tool. Originally made by Andrew Gryc (say "grits"), AutoREALM is now Open Source, creating a unique opportunity for the RPG world to mix graphics and computer programming" (OS: Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP; Runs under Wine on Linux systems)

CreateSpace is offering a free proof copy in paperback book form of every NaNoWriMo winner's manuscript. All you need is to sign up for a free CreateSpace account, and use a promotional code that will be issued to all winners on the NaNoWriMo site (available beginning December 2, 2010, valid through June 30, 2011.) For more information, read the details from Chris Baty here.

Get an occupation, a personality insight, and a nicely detailed physical description for a random character over at Serendipity with the Detailed Character Generator. Also for all those interior places and spaces in your story: a room description generator.

Want a free off-site backup space for your novel? A basic DropBox account is free, and comes with 2GB of space for as long as you need it (this one is also recommended by our blogpal Charlene Teglia.)

This Fake Name Generator allows you to pick your fake name's gender, ethnicity, country of residence, and generates them along with a whole slew of fake personal info.

Need to liven things up with your characters? Try FutureIsFiction.com's Let's put your character in a sticky situation generator.

Sweet Home 3Dis "a free interior design application that helps you place your furniture on a house 2D plan, with a 3D preview" (OS: Windows, Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.6, Linux and Solaris)

If you need to create a timeline for your novel, you can try the free level of TimeGlider here.

Jeroen Kessel's Word Generator creates artificial random words in your choice of seven languages. The helpful thing about this particular generator is that it produces words that look and even sound real; it also gives you sixty words at once, which gives provides a nice selection to choose from versus the one-word generators out there.