Resources

This page is a list of various resources intended to help an individual to either learn more about oneself and the world, or to seek help for various situations or problems. It is organized by categories. This list will be updated as I find more useful links, books, and information. Also, for more sites, see my blogroll, where I list the blogs that I read regularly.

Here is a list of books I recommend by Subject

General Writing

The Magic Words: Writing Great Books For Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein
The Steering Craft by Ursula LeGuin
Beginnings, Middles, & Ends by Nancy Kress
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer
The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Dille & Zuur Platten
Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life by Anne Lammott
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne and King (recommendation submitted by a friend.)
Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by David Gerrold
How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card (Am not fond of his books, but he does have good tips. Recommendation submitted by a friend.)
Writing Great Short Stories by Margaret Lucke (recommendation submitted by a friend.)
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland

Writing Resource Books

Worldbuilding by Stephen Gillett
Body Trauma: A Writer’s Guide to wounds and injuries by David W. Page, MD, FACS
The Writer’s Guide to Weapons by Benjamin Sobieck
Forensics for Writers by D.P. Lyle, M.D.
The Science of Aliens by Clifford Pickover
The Writer’s Guide to Psychology by Carolyn Kaufman, Psy.D
Space Travel by Ben Bova with Anthony R. Lewis
The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel by Eugene F. Mallove and Gregory L. Matloff
The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder
Advanced Language Construction by Mark Rosenfelder
Grammatically CORRECT: The Writer’s Guide to Punctuation, Spelling, Style, Usage, and Grammar by Anne Stillman

Writing Prompt Books

The 3.A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises by Brian Kiteley
Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Edited by Laurie Lamson
What Would Would Your Character Do? by Eric Maisel, Ph.D. and Ann Maisel

The following resources focus mostly on writing, but I include other sites I found under the writing resources. The majority of the writing resources — if not all of the links — come from LegendFire members while the writing site existed, and I’m hosting a copy here on my site.

Sex, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation:

General Writing/literature

Library Thing (Cataloging books owned)
Goodreads (Author resource, cataloging books)
Writer beware (Helping writers avoid scams)
Writing Excuses (a podcast)
Soul Food Cafe
Fiction Factor: Writing Novels
Daily Writing Tips
Super Hero Nation (Great Writing Articles)
Writer’s Digest
The Writing Teacher’s Strategy Guide
Pixar’s Storytelling Rules
Storytoolz (Series of tools such as word counts, generators, identifying cliches and more)

The Short Story

Poetry Resources

Screenwriting and Video game Writing

Writing Craft – Tropes and Themes

Writing Craft — Technical Aspects

Grammar
Writing Numbers
Who vs. that vs. which
Verb Tenses
Subject/Verb Agreement
Active and Passive Voice
Prepositions Information
Commas and their Accepted Rules
Semicolons
Different Types of Brackets and Parenthesis
Who vs Whom
Great Thesaurus – A Description Aid for Writers
50 Problem Words and Phrases

Writing Craft – POV and Styles of Writing

Character Design

Character Design Information MegaThread
Body Language and Emotion Thesaurus (heavily influenced by Western culture so are not representative of all cultures.)
Strong Characters Versus Weak Characters Article by C.J. Cherryh
Character Creation & Development Theory
Character Design Template Word Document and Fill-able PDF Form
HeroMachine 3 to assist with generating the physical appearance of possible characters (limited scope, not much diversity in body types).
Writing with color Part 1 and Part 2
Types of Hair — Type 1 through Type 4
Ways to Describe Characters of Color (post includes links to part 2 and 3)
Describing Skin colors and different Ethnicities

Plot and Structure

Tip Articles

Writing Software

yWriter5 [Open Source for Windows and Linux]
Scrivener [Commercial; Windows and Mac. I use this software]
- Upgraded Novel Template [use 7z to extract after download into Scrivener template folder]
Writer’s Cafe Software [Commercial with a Demo; Windows, Mac, or Linux]
Liquid Story Binder [Commercial with a Demo; Windows]
Celtx [Commercial; Windows, Linux, Mac] – Video and Movie Planning
Zim Desktop Wiki [Open-source; Linux and Windows]
Sigil* [Free; Windows, Mac, Linux] – A WYSIWYG ebook editor
25+ Writing Software Everyone Should Know About
Quoll Writing [open-source; Windows]

Text editors and Word Processors

Scribes text editor [Linux] – Spellchecking. Basic text editing. Saves automatically.
Notepad (nonfree:comes with Windows OS) [Windows] – Standard for plain text editing
FocusWriter [Linux, Windows, Mac]
Wordpad [nonfree: comes with Windows OS – Windows]
OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice Productivity Suites [Windows, Linux, Mac]
Word Office Suite [Commercial; Windows and Mac]
LyX [Open Source; Windows, Mac, Linux]
Plume Creator [Open-source]

Note-taking software

Microsoft Onenote [Windows and Mac] (nonfree: Part of the Microsoft Office Suite)
BasKet Note Pads [Linux: KDE-based] – “Multi-purpose note-taking application.”
Zoho Notebook [platform independent] – Online collaborative notebook.
Freemind [platform independent] – mindmapping software

Writing Courses