Wednesday, October 07, 2009

NaNoWriMo Ten

Ten Things for the NaNoWriMoer's

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

New Nano Badges!









(I've uploaded .jpgs of all eight badges over on my Photobucket account if any of you want to use the codes.)

Get character names in an instant online with Kleimo's Random Name Generator, which uses data from the US Census to generate up to 30 male and female names at once; you preset the obscurity factor from 1 to 99 (1=Common, 50=Not so common, 99=Totally obscure.)

NovProg2 "allows you to create a graph of your progress in writing a NaNoWriMo style novel. You enter your wordcount and it updates a graph showing you how much progress you have made. It also shows you how far you are through your daily goal, and your total goal. Mousing over a bar in the graph will show a tooltip with that day's wordcount." (OS: Win 2000/XP/2003/Vista)

Outline Your Novel in Thirty Minutes by Alicia Rasley

Special Offers from NaNo-friendly companies: Create Space, Scrivener, Writer's Digest and AlphaSmart all have some nice discounts or offers here for NaNo'ers.

If you need some help putting together an outline or a plan for your NaNo story, try one of PBW's how-to freebies: Novel Wiring Diagram (blank and filled out), Ten Point Novel Plot Outline Template, or The Novel Notebook. Also, since year I get asked for these, here are the links to my single novel plotting template, trilogy plotting template and mid-length series plotting template.

The Printable Notebook "lets you organize and print your personal data in the same manner a paper notebook does. You can print (and cut) selected pages so that they fit into your paper notebook. The program allows you to create multiple notebooks with custom fields for each. It includes several sample print templates, that will fit a standard notebook size. The templates are XML based and can be edited by experienced users to accommodate other formats. Printable Notebook supports website links and email fields, different tab layouts, search across notebooks and more" (OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP)

When you just can't think of the word: OneLook's Reverse Online Dictionary allows users to "describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the "Find words" button. Keep it short to get the best results. In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first."

Not sure what constitutes a novel scene, or what to put in it? Get my jewels o' scenic wisdom in my PBW post Scene Building 101.

Finally, links that are most requested from me during NaNoWriMo (hover your cursor over the link title to get a description): Notecarding: Plotting Under Pressure, Novel Outlining 101, Richard Salsbury's Rough Draft, Seventh Sanctum, Text Block Writer.

8 comments:

  1. Just dropping a good luck to all the NaNoers. It's a hard month, but the results are worth it at the end. Use the prep time now, it'll save you so many tears at the end!

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  2. Thanks for your ongoing generosity Lynn.

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  3. I love Onelook. I use it all the freaking time.

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  4. Thanks for all the links and the info!

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  5. That steampunk nano badge is the coolest. Almost makes me wish I was doing Nano.

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  6. I am getting so excited. I like the black and green badges. My dysnomia will like the reverse look up. I'm going to check it out. Thanks fr all of the cool links.

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  7. Anonymous10:20 AM

    Also, from the NaNo site: Scrivener is available for download on a NaNoWriMo trial version! If you win you get 50% off the purchase of the full download. If not, you still get 20% off for being a NaNo participant. All in all good stuff.

    I can't wait to NaNo!

    (And I've finally got access to blogger and email again!)

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  8. Anonymous10:38 PM

    Great resources! Thanks for sharing. I plan to check-out everyone of them.

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