What the Heck, Answered

If you've ever seen or taken a picture of something you were unable to identify, Wolfram's Image Identification Project may be able to help. I used it to upload a photo of a bird I didn't recognize at the beach, and it named it for me:



It doesn't always get the identification right, of course:



That's a zentangle I drew, not lace, so IIP does make mistakes. Still, if you're researching something and need to ID an image, this might be a quick way to get some help.

(Link to IIP swiped from Gerard over at The Presurfer)

Color Reference Notebook

Over the years I've collected or put together so many color-related swatches, charts, pamphlets, palettes and word lists that I decided to consolidate them in one reference notebook. That way the next time I need to describe a particular shade of white I can have all the whites I've saved in one place.

Color referencing in fiction can be tricky, as I think the writer's first tendency is to grab a cliche or relate something to food. Who hasn't read at least one story in which a frightened character went white as a sheet, or possessed flawless creamy-white skin? But we know this is really lazy writing, and we owe the reader a bit more originality and effort.

I started my notebook with white, which happens to be my color reference nemesis. I discovered how difficult it is to describe white when I made the eyes of my Jorenian characters in the StarDoc series that color -- and subsequently cursed myself for doing so for the next thirteen years. All my color references to white were contemporary, and here I was writing in a far future where 99% of them didn't exist. Anyway, most of the time I fell back on a blind-person analogy or the white-within-white thing. It was lame, and it's probably the reason I started collecting color references in the first place, to broaden my understanding of color as well as beef up my descriptive powers.



We all see and respond to color differently, so this kind of notebook is a great exercise in originality. You can put anything that inspires you in a color reference notebook; what you want is something that naturally stimulates your powers of description. I find combining paint charts and photos with word lists related to the color usually primes the well for me, but I also plan to use cover art, scanned images from my favorite magazines (Artful Blogging has tons of ladies who do the all-white decorating thing) as well as poems I associate with particular colors or palettes. Here's a page with Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, definitely my #1 white poem:



A color reference notebook is also a good storage encyclopedia for references you've already used in stories past. This can help prevent you from becoming that a descriptive repeater who in every book has a character with chocolate brown eyes or flaming red hair. Doesn't seem like it would be a problem, but wait until you've written twenty or thirty novels and suddenly you notice that every other guy character you write has laser-beam blue eyes.

What would you put in a color reference notebook to help jog your descriptive powers? Let us know in comments.

Related posts: Palettes with Color Names ~ Story Palettes ~ Character Palettes

Meaningful Ten

Ten Things to Help You Check, Define and Refine Words

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

Rick Meyer's e-Sword Bible study freeware allows you to view multiple versions of the Holy Scriptures, create a parallel Bible with up to four translations, additions of your own commentaries and notes, view graphics and much, much more, plus it offers Strong's definitions [oh, to have found this baby BEFORE I bought the monster that is the print version of Strong's, *sigh*] (OS: OS: Win 9x/ME/2K/NT/XP)

Just released, Lingoes v. 2.4.5 "integrates cursor translator, looking-up in dictionaries and intelligent translation by creative zoned word translator. With selection of word or sentence in screen by cursor, it will translate as many as 23 languages of text into your native language." (OS: Win 2000/XP/2003/Vista)

Grady Ward's Mobysaurus is "a comprehensive, feature-rich, easy-to-use English thesaurus for Windows. In addition to numerous built-in powerful features (usually seen only in commercial products), it offers some major unique benefits that no other thesaurus product (software or otherwise) does, including a huge database of 2.5 million synonyms, Find Synonymous Headwords and Suggest Headwords, that make this free thesaurus software the right tool for you to find the right words at the right time." Mobysaurus also now has a free online thesaurus to play with, too, btw. (OS: Win 98/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3/Vista)

Nisus Thesaurus offers "a fast electronic thesaurus that automatically integrates with any service aware application including Nisus Writer Express, Nisus Writer Pro, Mail, TextEdit, Safari, and more." (OS: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later; G3 (or better) or Intel Mac.)*

This one is pretty neat -- you can quickly check your spelling, grammar, and access a thesaurus online for any text you cut-n-paste into the text check box over at Spellchecker.net (great for e-mails.)

Professor Jack Lynch from Rutger's University touts The Online Grammar Guide as the "ultimate online guide to English grammar for advanced users of English." I didn't find everything I normally mess up (I guess that means I'm not an advanced user), but I like the common sense approach and wording of the explanations.

TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus is "a professional software package that integrates a complete dictionary and multifaceted thesaurus of the English language into a single and powerful language reference system. TheSage can look up words directly from almost any program (IE, Word, Firefox, Outlook, Thunderbird,... ) and is 100% portable." [Sequence Publishing has also made TheSage's dictionary an online tool, too, if you want to test drive it before downloading the freeware.] (OS: Win 98/ME/2K/XP)

Although it is not free, I always recommend ThinkMap's The Visual Thesaurus software as a great tool for visually-oriented writers (but please do give it a free try online first to see how it works.) You can purchase the software outright [$39.95] or subscribe online [$2.95/mo; $19.95/yr] (OS: Windows: 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista; Mac OSX 10+)

When I need a word that begins, contains or ends with specific letters, I go over to use the search engine at Word Navigator. Their word lists are pretty helpful, too.

XTerm Medical Dictionary is "comprehensive dictionary of medical terms. It’s all presented in a handy, easy to use application that includes a search engine with wildcard and incorrect spelling searches. The database of medical terms is updated twice a month and the software features a function to easily download and add these updates." (OS: Win 98/2K/XP)

*Link swiped from Sudeep Bansal's very interesting weblog, Brilliant Ignorance.